“The Bear,” “Only Murders,” and more of this summer’s hottest TV series
USA TODAY TV critic Kelly Lawler lists this summer’s must-see TV shows, including the return of “The Bear” and “Only Murders in the Building.”
PASADENA, Calif. – Brian Jordan Alvarez rose to viral fame on TikTok with face filters. Now he’s unveiling a wild new comedy series as the creator, writer and star, and hoping he doesn’t get lectured.
Alvarez spent his 37th birthday in July promoting “English Teacher,” his new FX comedy series (Mondays, 10 a.m. EDT/PDT, streaming the next day on Hulu). Playing Evan Marquez, a gay English teacher at an Austin, Texas, high school, he gets into trouble with his principal (Enrico Colantoni, “Veronica Mars”) after an outraged parent catches him kissing his boyfriend in the school parking lot. In later episodes, we meet the pushy mother, learn from a particularly empathetic gym teacher (Sean Patton) and see Evan deal with spoiled students, faculty headaches and imagined illnesses like “asymptomatic Tourette syndrome.” You could call it a more subversive, edgier and raunchier version of the ABC hit “Abbott Elementary.”
The actor and comedian rose to early fame in 2016 with a YouTube series called “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo” starring Stephanie Koenig, a writer on “Teacher” who plays history teacher Gwen Sanders. He has nearly 700,000 followers of those TikTok videos, played Estefan Gloria, the fiancé (and eventual husband) of Sean Hayes’ Jack, in 13 episodes of NBC’s “Will & Grace” reboot and played Cole, who helped create the creepy robot in the cheesy 2022 horror film “M3gan.” (He’s filming a sequel in New Zealand.) He chats with USA TODAY about his latest project and how he learned to run his own show. (The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Question: The question posed in the show’s tagline is: “Can you really be yourself at work?” Is this description justified?
Brian Jordan Alvarez: The answer is complicated, and the show walks that line, it really lives by that question.
Was “English Teacher” inspired by other classroom comedies you’ve seen? People might say, “Oh, it’s just like Abbott Elementary.”
This is a brilliant show. And (creator) Quinta (Brunson) is such a genius. No, this show just exists in its own universe. It’s a very special voice.
Namely…
It’s a really hard comedy. (Executive producer) Paul Simms has always been great about making sure it’s a comedy. We want people to laugh from start to finish.
So not like “The Bear”.
(Laughs) There are a lot of great dramedy TV shows. There’s just this feeling of, “Hey, let’s really make jokes, jokes, jokes here,” and that’s one of the things I love so much because the show still has a lot of heart.
How do you research the things you write about students?
I’m very online. I spend a lot of time scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, and I feel relatively up to date with things, how people are talking now. And what you see a lot on Twitter is what young people think about old people, what older people think about young people. People blame that generation. The show really thrives on different people doing what they think is good, but they disagree with what is good. And sometimes characters are trying to do something good, but they end up doing something bad.
You don’t think much about the children, but was it difficult to cast them?
We have so many funny kids. Two of them basically came directly from TikTok. There’s this guy, Ben Bondurant, and he’s the kid in the pilot who says, “If they get you, they’ll get you.” Someone had tagged me in his video on TikTok and said, “This guy reminds me of you.” We started watching his videos. He’s so funny. He’ll just sit in his car and text me, “You guys changed my life.” And our set is very open to ideas, open to people improvising, and so sometimes they’ll tell us what’s cool, or I’ll say, “How would you really say that or make it seem realistic to yourself?” We cast maybe 70 to 80 percent of the kids for that role.
How important is it that Evan is gay and how does that influence your approach to the show?
What I love about it is that we can write from that insider perspective and make jokes that really only make sense from that perspective. That way people can feel authenticity.
What have you learned from appearing on other TV shows like “Will & Grace” and “Jane the Virgin”?
Being on ‘Will and Grace’ was a really great learning experience. There’s this real clarity in our show about the energy we’re trying to achieve: people talking over each other and the fast pace. Just seeing (co-creator) Max Mutchnick, (director) Jim Burrows and also the actors, like Sean Hayes, perform with so much clarity and confidence and really give it their all. And when Max was very clear about what he wanted, that spurred me to be very clear in production about what I wanted and to speak freely.
And are you done with your face filters?
No, I’m just starting. Four thousand of them, you have to do more.
