Comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez has branched out with a bold comedy-drama series, eight twenty-minute-long episodes of English Teacher, in which he plays a teacher in an Austin, Texas school who is gay. The show seeks to marry slapstick humor with an eclectic bunch of teaching staff and education issues, and often it succeeds. He himself is earnest in the lead role and the other key actors succeed to an extent without standing out, the sole exception being Sean Patton as an appealing, bluff sports teacher. The short episodes lend themselves to pithy mini stories, and a few of them work well, but too many are either too didactic or slight. Highlighting the issues the teacher faces as openly gay in the 2020s is clearly important thematically and again, sometimes the scripts illuminate, but sometimes there is too much raunch or too much weightiness. In the end, English Teacher is an engaging couple of hours spread over a week of watching but fails to ignite either as entertainment or meaningful drama.
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