The origin story of FX and Hulu’s English Teacher begins with someone in bed. Before you worry (or hope?) that this is going to take an erotic turn, know that what was happening was perhaps one of the least-sexy things someone can do in bed: Scrolling through social media.
“It was absolute happenstance,” executive producer Paul Simms tells Consequence, about the process of discovering English Teacher creator Brian Jordan Alvarez. “I was lying in bed reading Twitter, because I’d read the rest of the internet already, and someone said, ‘Oh, [this web series] is really funny.’ I’d never heard of it, but I clicked on [The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo] and 30 seconds in I was like, ‘Ah, this is fun.’ And then I just kept watching.”
This was three years ago, at which point Simms was not only an established television creator, thanks to the classic NewsRadio — he had also become a master of bringing shows like Atlanta and What We Do in the Shadows to FX, with the creators’ original voices intact. In Alvarez, Simms says, he realized that “I would watch him in a show, which is always the only thing I can really go on. And so then I told someone I wanted to meet with him, and then we had a Zoom and I said, ‘You should have a real TV show.’ And he said, ‘Well, I sort of have this idea about a guy who is an English teacher.’ I’m like, ‘Great, let’s do that.’ So it was luck.”
Related Video
At the time Simms reached out, Alvarez had shifted from making web series like the acclaimed Caleb Gallo to acting in the projects of others, appearing in 13 episodes of the Will & Grave revival as well as 2022’s M3GAN. However, Alvarez says that the idea of a show set in high school intrigued him because “people from every part of life are forced to not only interact, but actually work together toward a common goal of educating these kids. And the character of Evan, he’s really getting it from all sides, and he’s trying to figure out what is right.”
As the titular teacher of English, Evan faces pushback from students, parents, other teachers, and the school board. He’s not alone in the trenches, though: Helping him survive the chaos is Evan’s best friend and fellow educator Gwen, played by Stephanie Koenig. Koenig first met Alvarez on a student film shoot years ago, and she says that “it was very meant to be. When you meet your best friend, you’re like, ‘Thank God.’ Somebody who hits your soul and really sees you. That happened when I met Brian. And we made each other laugh — that’s so important. Like, laughing is number one for me.”
Koenig appeared in Alvarez’s Caleb Gallo, and the pair remained friends through the struggles faced by actors trying to get a foothold in the industry. Alvarez was one of the first people to read Koenig’s writing, she says, and “he was like, ‘You are a good writer.’ It’s just so nice to hear that, especially when you’re testing for things and not getting it and struggling and nobody really knows you yet. It felt like it was the first time I could take control, like take things in my hands.”
In addition to acting in the series, Koenig is also a staff writer — and was technically a writer before being cast. Before the shooting of the pilot, she was part of a mini-writers’ room working on scripts, but the team wasn’t totally sure she’d be able to appear in the show at all, because Koenig was already set to appear in the Apple TV+ limited series Lessons in Chemistry, which was shooting around the same time.
“Big props to the line producers for actually caring and working on the schedule, because that can be such a headache for them,” she says. “I’m sure that they probably did not wanna go through that, but they did mainly because [Jonathan] Krisel and Paul and Brian really pushed for me.”
