It’s rare for a freshman comedy to find its footing as quickly as “English Teacher” has. Once that rhythm is found, it’s even rarer for a series to completely challenge that difficult-to-establish flow.
Yet that’s what Brian Jordan Alvarez’s FX comedy does just five episodes in thanks to “Field Trip,” an episode that explores Evan’s (Alvarez) relationship with his best friend, Gwen (Stephanie Koenig).
“I was really excited and eager [for the episode], mainly because I want to give her depth,” Koenig told TheWrap. “[Gwen] is very positive and tries to see the good in things. But she’s also a person who isn’t at all perfect and gets sad,” Koenig said. “Also, Evan is like her favorite, favorite person. So if there’s any sort of trouble within that relationship, it’s like a bomb went off. It’s just nice to see that she’s a real person.”
From the first minutes of “English Teacher,” the series sets up a specific dynamic for Evan and Gwen. Evan is the principled idealist whose love of grandstanding often gets him in trouble, and Gwen is his fierce and seemingly clueless supporter through thick and thin. Though Evan’s relationship with the other characters in this show often changes, his dynamic with Gwen serves as a centering force. That’s why Alvarez and his frequent collaborator Koenig knew they wanted to shake up this friendship.
“We kept going back to they probably don’t fight a lot, so it would be a big deal if they fought,” Koenig said, noting that the two fictional friends are often “pretty positive, supportive and understanding.” “It was almost tricky to figure out what the thing was going to be that we were going to fight about.”
The aptly titled “Field Trip” takes place during a school outing. In the first drafts, Evan and Gwen’s fight revolved around the two getting lost in the rain, but budgetary concerns caused the team to pull back their scope. Instead, they landed on a feud any high schooler can relate to: not getting invited to a hangout. While on the field trip, Evan learns that Gwen invited their school friends Markie (Sean Patton) and Rick (Carmen Christopher) over to her house to help her husband work on a pool.
“It’s a basic thing you would fight about. You don’t get invited to something, and it feels so much bigger than it was: a casual, non-invite,” Koenig said. “That’s something I dealt with that a lot when I was like 13, where I wouldn’t get invited to a party and it was like World War III. It was very a big deal.”
Evan and Gwen’s tiff quickly spirals well beyond this “non-invite.” As the two clumsily try to cross a ropes course together, Gwen accuses Evan of not wanting to help other people, a charge that greatly offends Evan. This increasingly silly, high school-level fight is contrasted by a similar fight happening literally right behind them between two of their students.
To make the shoot more complicated, the episode was also directed by Alvarez. “We have this huge crane that was flying up, and we’re way high up,” Koenig said. “That was like [Brian Jordan Alvarez’s] first week or maybe second week he was directing a television show episode, and it was like he had done it a million times.”
After a heated stunts course and a disastrous performance of “You Get What You Give,” Evan and Gwen break up, so to speak, and declare that they’re no longer each other’s best friends. But perhaps fittingly for these two actors, it’s a detail from their real lives that reunites them. When Gwen collapses from her latex allergy, only Evan knows what’s the matter.
“I think we might have subconsciously written in this allergy,” Koenig said. During reshoots, the team tried to dye Koenig’s hair to make it look the same as it did in another episode. That incorrect dye the star suggested caused a “huge” allergic reaction. “I had red hives. They were trying to hide it, and they were pumping me full of steroids to try to kick it,” Koenig said. “But it seems realistic that I would have some crazy allergy attack. There’s also realism in Brian really knowing very like me intuitively. Maybe we’re pulling from that.”
Ultimately, Koenig called the episode “very therapeutic” since she and Alvarez “barley” fight. “Ultimately, we did have to make it up because Brian and I, we have a work relationship along with being best friends. It’s really important that any sort of misstep or just tiny miscommunication we’re like ‘Wait, what? What was that?’ … We just don’t like fighting. We like talking it out,” Koenig said.
Though it’s only five episodes in, “English Teacher” seems to be a hit for FX. The series currently has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and is gaining a steady following of fans across TikTok and X. Koenig credits the show’s success to people just wanting to watch a funny show as well as Alvarez’s distinct comedic style and the strength of the cast.
“It’s just funny,” Koenig said. “It’s a show that I would absolutely watch and also replay in the background to feel good. If you read about the show, you hear that it has a lot of hot-button issues as topics and there’s a lot of dealing with different people’s political ideas and clashing with the students, parents and teachers. But then you watch the show, and it feels nothing like that … It does such a good job at making you feel good, regardless of what anybody’s arguing about.”
Koenig joked that Alvarez describes himself as “terminally online.” But she also believes that insight into how the internet operates and knowledge of trends has translated to “English Teacher.”
“I think that he loses interest quickly in shows, and so [‘English Teacher’ is] fast enough to keep everybody’s attention. It’s got the attention span of the internet, a little bit,” Koenig said. “Maybe that’s why it feels so current.”
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