Monday’s episode of FX’s English Teacher started with a literal bang — a deep, echoing gunshot heard by creator Brian Jordan Alvarez‘s titular English teacher (first name Evan) as he walked to meet his classroom of students. Evan throws his hot coffee across his dress shirt and falls to the floor in a truncated attempt at crawling, then grabs two students from the hallway and ushers them to safety in a nearby classroom.
Evan is panicked, but the kids are unimpressed — apathetic, even —and tell him that the sound was not actually reason for emergency, but rather the standard proceedings of Markie the gym teacher’s student gun club.
The setup feels serious as these sentences come together, but there’s something about the pacing of its events that maintain the comedy’s lightheartedness; the audience knows they’re supposed to laugh, even before they know everyone is safe. As the episode proceeds, Evan and Markie go head-to-head on gun control, and antics ensue.
Set in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, where liberals and conservatives butt heads and no issue is simple enough to write off with a political slogan, Alvarez wrote the show with an eye for this balance. “We always want to write the show with empathy,” he says, “and mostly we want to make you laugh.”
Below, Alvarez tells The Hollywood Reporter why he added guns to his comedy series about high school, how it all came about in the first place and why he chose English after all.
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Gun clubs, schools and comedies don’t seem like a natural fit. When did the idea pop into your head?
I think it came up pretty early. We were looking at how we can try and look at things differently. I think maybe it’s also a product of that Markie character: As he arose out of the ether and really started to have a voice, we thought it would make so much sense that this guy would have a gun club and that my character would be highly against that. We just had to figure out how to play it exactly, and I think we found a lot of interesting texture. There were times that this particular script was challenging, but we kept finding our way through.
Challenging — say more.
We had to figure out, how can we really talk about this and how can we be so funny that you’re dying laughing? And really, maybe it’s obvious, but it’s just a matter of finding beats that make sense and story turns that make sense. Luckily we have these brilliant writers, especially Dave King — he’s one of the first writers that got added to English Teacher — and you just start figuring out these turns and how to surprise the audience, and how to surprise yourself.
Did you have a goal in mind when you started writing this episode?
I think a lot of the show is looking at idealism. And in this episode in particular… we always want to write the show with empathy, and mostly we want to make you laugh. But I think this episode is looking at activism as a concept. Even is doing something symbolic in this episode, meaning he’s trying to get rid of a gun club for the sake of the concept of guns. We don’t want to tell you how to interpret that, but what’s interesting about it to me is activism can sometimes feel — let me say this carefully. Sometimes activism has to be on a symbolic level. You have to do something almost as a gesture to show what you mean, even if it doesn’t exactly make perfect sense.
So I see Evan’s perspective here, and I think the episode does a good job of showing all the characters’ perspectives, and that’s what makes it interesting. We don’t want to tell you how to interpret an episode, and we always say when we’re talking about the show, “The show is for everybody.” The show isn’t mad at you. And it welcomes you. It welcomes you to watch it and to think about it.
Let’s back up then. When did English Teacher start?
Paul Simms had seen some of my work online and then came to me and was like, “Let’s make a TV show.” This is fall of 2020. We did a Zoom meeting, and I was little bit like, “I’m more just into acting right now.” I had just booked M3GAN, I had just come off of Will & Grace. The truth is, I was like, “I’ve tried to make it through the real system, and I had not succeeded.” And I remember he said, “You’re coming out of retirement, we’re making a TV show.”
What a dream come true.
It’s like the thing you want to hear in your life. You’re saying, “I don’t know if I believe in myself enough,” and somebody goes, “I do,” and that person has the best resume you’ve ever heard of — he makes What We Do In The Shadows, which is brilliant, Atlanta, which is brilliant, and NewsRadio back in the day, which I grew up on. He is a genius at what he does, at writing and producing and also just understanding how all this works, when to step in, when to pull back. And also he has always still known that he’s helping me get my voice out there, and not squashing that. So I’ve very grateful to him.
This idea [for English Teacher] just kind of popped into my head — I was like, high school is an interesting environment where all these different people from different parts of life have to interact for a common goal.
There’s a timelessness to the setting too, and so many other great shows and movies have taken place in high school. Did you look at anything in particular for reference?
I didn’t. You know, I’m one of those people that, for better or for worse, I try not too much to be inspired by other movies or anything. I mean, I have my inspirations — I’m always trying to basically make a Pedro Almodóvar movie, and I’m also always kind of trying to make Dirty Dancing one way or another. Maybe I can see flavors of that in the show, but no, nothing high school.
What I really wanted to do, and what I often have the craving to do, is make something classic. Something kind of timeless. That’s why there’s ’80s music, these iconic moments. And we even would talk about that in the writers room, creating iconic images and moments. How do you do that well? School is so timeless. We’ve all been to high school.
Why Austin?
I grew up in very rural Tennessee, so most of my upbringing was in a very conservative place. And don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of wonderful people in my childhood, and I had a great childhood. I had a lot of fun. And I’m glad I grew up sort of in the country, I think it gave me maybe some inner peace that I wouldn’t otherwise have. But then I went to high school in a highly liberal town in the greater very conservative Tennessee area. And Austin has a bit of that same texture, this very liberal place in a broadly much more conservative place. And then we put it in the suburbs of Austin, which is even more complex, because then you’ve got both the elements at work.
Why English?
I don’t know, maybe it’s a little bit of a nod to the thing where, there’s this famous this where gay guys come out to their English teachers, and I did — I think it was Mrs. Brown, my senior year of high school. She was awesome. And I had Claire Reichman, an English teacher that I really loved. And we had this English teacher named Phil White in my high school in that liberal town that I was talking about. He would squat up on his chair, he was always perched for class. It was like, his famous thing. I guess if I was going to be a teacher, maybe I’d be an English teacher.
Did anyone ever tell you the “School Safety” episode was a bad idea?
We knew we had to handle it with care, and the network knew that too, and we wanted to. But I would say one of the things that FX is so spectacular at doing is seeing how you can make an episode deeper and more interesting. We have a lot of great executives on this — Kate Lambert, Jonathan Frank. They just gently and intelligently suggest ways to go deeper and smarter. And then you’ve got John Landgraf at the top of FX; he’s a very deeper thinker and he’ll look at your show and go, “In a bigger way, what we’re talking about with this show is this.”
You meet these executives, and you go, “No wonder FX is on a winning streak.” Everything they make is great, they have so little to prove, so they can really go, “Well how to we make this better, for fun, because we like making good TV.”
We take all of that, and then, we go, “How do we make this so funny that you can’t breathe? Jokejokejokejoke and having all that texture of meaningful thinking.
Speaking of so funny you can’t breathe, how did you develop the students’ characters?
Well, I’m very online, so I’m pretty up to date on what’s fresh, what people are talking about and what people are arguing about — where the culture is moving, where people are resisting that. So I think it’s largely informed by that, and also this idea that came up early on, I think largely to Paul Simms’ and FX’s credit, which is this idea that the kids can often be smarter than the teachers. We’re learning from them, and they’re learning from us. We’re all just people trying to figure out life. Somebody also said that the kids, especially in that book club, they kind of act like a Greek chorus in the show. We’re running ideas by them and processing information.
Plus, you also start to cast really funny kids and you start to write in their voices. We definitely give them takes where they can improv little things.
Did the actors have anything to add, being students who are part of the post-Sandy Hook world?
We talked about it, even when were just sitting around on set that day, they were saying, “Yeah we really did grow up with shooting drills.” I, Brian, never had one of those in my life.
There’s a directness to the way the students talk about gun safety in the episode — one of them tells you you can go through the metal detector with metal, “it just beeps.”
The show is also about showing all these different feelings that exist in real life, in the youth — feeling inspired, but also feeling apathetic and feeling like you could change things and feeling like you can’t change things. We’ve all experienced that growing up, too. It’s also a timeless experience.
Did you know the show was going to release during an election year?
When you write something, you want it to get made the next day. I remember saying, “We’ve got to be careful, these jokes could seem old by the time this airs.” In a way, that was just me going, “Can we please make this TV show?” But it’s a combination of realizing the jokes are more timeless than you thought, and also just constantly refreshing your humor as your go along. I did not quite know how timely it would be, but I hoped to make a show that was timeless enough to be timely whenever it came out, and I think we’ve done that.
We’re four episodes in, and you’ve tackled drag queens and gun safety. What else is on the English Teacher bucket list?
One thing — this maybe isn’t as interesting as I wish it were — but there is this thing that I found out from real friends who are teachers, where it’s actually common to make your students put their phones in a cubby thing on the wall. So I was thinking we could play with that, with this idea of the kids trying to get around that rule. I look at these kids now, and I’m like, of course they’re going to have phones. The world is on your phone, I’m on my phone so much.
English Teacher releases new episodes weekly Monday nights on FX at 10 p.m., streaming the next day on Hulu.
