English Teacher, Your Dunning-Kruger Thirties

On a basic level, English Teacher is a straightforward single-camera sitcom; it’s novel to have an American sitcom this blatantly and genuinely horny, moreso that it’s a gay male flavor of horny*, but it shoots for the fundamentals of the genre with wacky plots and constant one-liners. I locked onto the show’s sense of humor early in the first episode, where protagonist Evan (Brian Jordan Alvarez) interrupts a typically self-righteous rant with “Oh, I love this song,” before jumping right back in. The humor leans towards realistic awkwardness within a scene combined with larger-than-life plot structures where an absurd situation escalates.

*I enjoy that Alvarez allows himself to be leered at by the camera. There’s one notable shot where Evan climbs out of bed and his boyfriend snaps his undies, causing them to be half-hanging off his butt. You wouldn’t see that on Scrubs. 

What’s really interesting, though, is that this is a story about a guy in his thirties – old enough to know better, young enough to think he does. Evan is, as the title implies, an English teacher, and by this point he’s experienced enough to get world-weary – not just about the students or the faculty, but about people and his love life. On the other hand, he’s not as worldly as he believes himself; his stories are frequently about situations getting out of his control.

A big part of it, I think, is that Evan is still reaching beyond his grasp. Let me back up: you may be familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, a famous psychological aphorism that people tend to overestimate their competence at things they’re not good at and underestimate their competence at things they are. This usually comes up when people do dumb things, which makes sense; people like feeling smarter than other people. But I believe English Teacher successfully shows both halves of this idea.

Here’s a list of what Evan tries to do in ascending order of the amount of effort he puts in: get through the school day teaching kids about English. Be a fun guy to hang out with. Inspire others to do good. Be a great boyfriend. Viewers of the show may notice that this list also presents in descending order how successful he is at these things. On one end of the scale, while we get very little of Evan’s day-to-day teaching, what we do see indicates a conscientious and hard worker willing to put in the effort of organization (he keeps a regular book club that the kids apparently love) and, you know, marking.

On the other, Evan comes off genuinely deranged when it comes to his love life, often acting impulsively, descending into absurd fantasy, getting hysterically emotional, and generally just making destructive decisions. It’s when you get in the middle that it gets really interesting; more often than not, Evan fails to be the inspirational leader he desperately wants to be, and you can see it’s because he’s going against his better instincts for what he thinks should work. This is where we hit something interesting that’s hard for me to articulate.

It is in human nature to dislike being bored. I notice this is particularly true of the vague leftist Evan embodies; we like the intellectual stimulation of complicated things and big systems. There is a part of Evan that wants to keep trying to do difficult, ambitious things like leading the school in a protest against guns. But the thing about ambitious goals is that, by definition, you don’t fully know what you’re doing, and however successful you are, you’re going to make mistakes in the process.

Evan very rarely makes mistakes when it comes to his daily teaching; one could point to his disastrous-and-yet-weirdly-successful attempt to lead the Powderpuff performance, but I would consider that outside his job description and firmly in the “inspire others” goal. Whenever we see him just marking tests, leading a class, or other basic work, he seems fairly competent. I think we’ve come into his life to a point where he’s so comfortable doing the grunt work that he’s forgotten he’s actually good at it. By definition, we only want things we don’t already have.

Certainly, we see him contemplate leaving teaching because he’s become disillusioned at it and wondering if he does any good whatsoever, which I would put down to him being so used to success, at least in one limited area, that it’s only what he doesn’t have that registers for him. I think this is a thing that can happen to anyone, especially as one starts to approach middle age; when you’re young, life is entirely about things you don’t have, which can be either paralyzing or freeing depending on who you are.

This is certainly what makes Evan amusingly pathetic; he’s so neurotically caught up in chasing big, ambitious goals that he naturally ends up fucking up a lot and making a complete fool of himself. He’s such a wide-eyed romantic desperate for the swooning, fireworks-going-off-romance that he comes off like a crazy asshole; he’s so desperate to be an inspiring leader that he picks the first, most obvious obnoxious speech that comes to mind.

One can compare him directly with Markie (Sean Patton), whose goals are significantly less ambitious and thus more frequently achieved – and notice that he’s just as frequently prone to looking like an asshole as Evan in his own romantic life, where he has much more romanticized hopes.

Ambition isn’t all bad, though, and one can see this in Evan’s one goal I haven’t explored – being a cool dude to hang with. I would say this is the one area where Evan is about 75% successful and only just reaching beyond his grasp; most of the time, he’s charismatic and fun to talk to because he’s not taking himself too seriously, and he’s generally willing to put himself in situations he’s only slightly uncomfortable in that he’s willing to learn from.

One can look at “Field Trip” as the perfect articulation of this; Evan discovers that Gwen (Stephanie Koenig) is hanging out with their friends without him frequently and gets mad at her. It’s a situation that gets tense without being the utter, cartoonish disaster his other problems tend to be, and it’s a situation he’s quickly willing to learn from without compromising himself for something abstract he likes the idea of. Ideally, he’d solve all his problems this way.