ENGLISH TEACHER – Season 1 Key Art | ©2024 FX

ENGLISH TEACHER has its first-season finale on FX on Monday, October 14. Following this, the episode will join the rest of the comedy’s first season streaming on Hulu.

Series creator Brian Jordan Alvarez stars as Evan Marquez, a gay high school teacher in Austin, Texas, where unexpected controversies continually baffle staff and students alike.

When ENGLISH TEACHER has a Q&A panel during FX’s portion of the summer Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour, one of the executive producers, Paul Simms, offers this observation: “A lot of what the show is about is the characters within the show talking about what we’re allowed to say anymore and what’s right and what’s wrong these days.”

When a question is asked about the shows use of pop music in the episodes, Dave King (PARKS AND RECREATION, THE GOOD PLACE), another executive producer who is also a writer on ENGLISH TEACHER explains, “Early on, we’d put up one song for each episode in the writers’ room. It didn’t always end up being the song in the episode, but it was the vibe [for the episode], and it was always generally big, fun. That was like, ‘Okay, this episode is this song. Keep that in your head when we’re writing.’ ‘Maniac’ was one of them.”

Improvisation is encouraged on the ENGLISH TEACHER set, and King notes that the young actors playing the students sometimes come up with great lines. “The kids would say stuff that we were like, ‘Where did that come from?’ Because they’re real kids, and we don’t know what kids say all the time.”

After the panel, Simms, also show runner and executive producer on WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, which launches its sixth and final season on FX on Monday, October 21, sits down with King to talk more about ENGLISH TEACHER.

Did FX come to Simms for ENGLISH TEACHER because the network had already worked with him on WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS and ATLANTA?

“No, it was the opposite,” Simms replies. “I found Brian and took him to FX and said, ‘This is your next hit,’ and I just kept repeating that until they believed it. But I think they saw very quickly what I had seen in him and seeing his Web series [THE GAY AND WONDROUS LIFE OF CALEB GALLO, which Alvarez created and starred in]. I saw it completely by accident, and thought it was so funny and so original, it surprised me, because I don’t see that many good Web series.”

Simms and King are friends, but ENGLISH TEACHER is the first time they’ve worked together, Simms relates. “I’ve known Dave for a long time, and I’ve been trying to work with him forever, and I finally persuaded him to do it. And then I met with Brian, and I said, ‘You should do a real TV show.’ And he said, ‘Well, I have an idea for a show about an English teacher,’ and we started working on it. And I said, ‘You know who you would really like is Dave King.’ And they met, and the rest is history.”

King takes it from here. “Yes. I came on after the pilot was done, and I watched the CALEB GALLO Web series, and there was something undeniably funny and interesting about Brian and the people he works with.”

Did ENGLISH TEACHER change greatly from Alvarez’s original concept of it to the series that the audience sees?

Simms opines, “This is basically the best realization of what his original concept was. Everything I’ve ever made goes through different permutations. You never end up exactly where you started. But my job, when I work with writers like Brian, or when I worked with Donald Glover, is figuring out what it is that they want to say, what is it that they think is funny, and figuring out the best way for them to do it without making any of the many mistakes I made earlier in my career.”

Brian Jordan Alvarez as Evan Marquez in ENGLISH TEACHER – Season 1 | ©2024 FX/Pari Dukovic

King approves. “Well said.”

While Simms doesn’t believe that ENGLISH TEACHER mirrors his or King’s own high school experiences, “Both of my parents were schoolteachers, and Dave’s mother is a schoolteacher, so we both have the perspective of growing up listening to what teachers talk about when kids aren’t around, when they’re complaining and arguing. So, in that sense, there’s a level of [verisimilitude] there. My kids are fourteen and twelve, so they’re not high school yet. But there are definite controversies and conversations that are happening, even in grade school.”

King, on the other hand, thinks maybe there’s some memories being incorporated into the series. “If there’s anything in the show that’s reflected from our high school experience, it would be when we got to a moment in the script where we asked, ‘What would the least popular kid in class say at this point?’ That would be our point of view.”

Simms laughs appreciatively.

How is it working with Alvarez, who is pulling quintuple duty as creator-star-writer-director-executive producer? How does he communicate what he wants everyone around him to do?

“Well,” King relates, “he’s in the writers’ room the whole time also, so it’s sort of the way I’ve done every show I’ve worked on, where there’s a period of three months or so where the writers, including Brian, are all together, just trying to figure out what the show is, what the stories are, that kind of thing. I think we did have one experience this season where there was a script that just wasn’t working. We were already shooting, and we just had to write a brand-new script from scratch, but that’s okay.”

Simms adds, “But that definitely was a case where Brian was so busy. That was my only worry about Brian doing the show was wearing so many hats – writing, directing, acting. My worry about him wasn’t his abilities, but just the fatigue level that sets in. For someone doing it for the first time, they often don’t anticipate just how much time everything takes. I remember saying early on in the process, ‘But this is where you’re going to want to take a nap, when we’re shooting, or when we’re rewriting or editing.’ And he somehow found energy to not need those naps, and doing every different facet of the job.”

“Including directing,” King elaborates. “I think that people from the outside have an idea that directing is much more artsy than it is, that it’s about talking about emotions and tweaking characters. Directing is answering five thousand questions – should it be a blue shirt, should it be a red shirt, are we shooting this outside, or are we shooting it inside? The director is the one who can answer all these things, and it is an overwhelming job.”

In the “Powderpuff” episode, drag star Trixie Mattel guest stars as a drag performer who comes in to mentor the high school football team for a song-and-dance performance. Was the role created for Mattel, or was the script written, and then Mattel became involved?

“I think it was a little of both with that,” Simms recalls. “I think the idea started first, and then Trixie was the first name that was mentioned, because Brian knew her a little bit, and knew that she was funny.”

King concurs. “The idea, I believe, came first for the episode, and the script was written first, or at least outlined, that Brian and Trixie, whose [non-drag] name is also Brian [Michael Firkis]. So, the Brians kind of knew each other already, and it was one of those situations where it was like, when we got to casting, ‘Well, if Trixie was somehow available and able to do this, that would be amazing. If not, then we’ll look at tapes and somehow try to figure out this part.’ And Trixie was [available], and was incredible.”

Some of the young actors playing the high school students are over eighteen and playing younger; some are actually minors, who have union rules regulating their education and working hours.

“Some of them I think are under eighteen,” Simms says. “We follow all of the appropriate SAG rules. It’s hard doing a high school show with twenty-six-year-olds playing kids, but there are certain challenges when some of them are under eighteen as far as how long we can shoot.”

But, Simms continues, this so far hasn’t been much of a problem. “The show has always set out to be mainly about the teachers. I think our main scenes with the kids are ones where Brian’s character is talking to them and hearing what they have to say.”

King takes up the thread. “We’ve always had scenes for creative reasons, which came first, that do not have kids in them. Every episode, I think, has scenes that don’t have kids in them. So, we were lucky that we never ran into production [issues].”

Simms adds, “I think one thing we would never see in the show is a scene with just kids and none of our regular characters. Because it really is from the point of view of Brian and his fellow teachers.”

In the course of making ENGLISH TEACHER, has either Simms or King found out about issues they hadn’t known existed?

“I’m trying to think,” says Simms. “Everything is an issue these days, and that’s sort of what the fun of the show is, it’s about everyone trying to figure out what the right thing to do and say is these days, and how we’re all trying to do the right thing.”

King knew “that phones were obviously an issue in school, but I didn’t know that filming teachers was an issue. There are certain tangential social media things that cut both ways. I didn’t realize that was going on at all.”

Something that ENGLISH TEACHER may tackle in the future, Simms teases, although “It’s too late, we’ve already finished [producing first] season, but there was a thing where these kids were doing funny Tik-Toks about the teachers, they started their own Tik-Tok channel they keep on all the teachers, and the teachers were saying, ‘This is not fair.’ Perfect grist for [ENGLISH TEACHER].”

And what do King and Simms both most want people to get out of ENGLISH TEACHER?

“Laughs,” says King. “I think with each of these characters, when you first meet them, you think that they’re a type that you know, and then you realize that there’s complexity to them, and that, as in real life, no one is who you think they are when you first meet them. But mainly laughs.”

Simms agrees. “Yes. I think it would be nice if there’s some relatability. I think people will be able to see some aspect of their life reflected in the show, even if they have nothing to do with a school or teaching. There’s a lot of, what does it mean to be friends with someone, to be a partner to someone, and also to deal with quickly moving political sands.”

“But mainly laughs,” King reiterates. “I don’t like shows that feel like homework, I like shows where you like the people and they make you laugh and you turn it on and you enjoy it, and you watch the next one the next week. I’m old-fashioned.”

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Article: ENGLISH TEACHER: Executive producers  Paul Simms and Dave King on Season 1 of the new FX TV series – Interview 

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