Brian Jordan Alvarez

Watch Evan Marquez in the staffroom of English Teacher (2024) and you can see two Brian Jordan Alvarezes at once. The lines are quick and land before you have quite caught them; the man saying them is bright, slightly performed, a little like someone doing bits in his own show. Alvarez created the series, wrote for it, directed episodes and took the lead, and the first three jobs come to him more easily than the fourth.

He arrived the long way round. He made films and acted as a child, and built his early reputation on self-produced web series and sketches, above all The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo (2016), which he created, wrote, directed, produced, edited and starred in. Guest and recurring television parts followed through the 2010s, and the Will & Grace revival (2018), where he played Estefan Gloria, brought wider attention. M3GAN (2022), with Alvarez as Cole, put him in a hit. Then the producer Paul Simms, who had seen Caleb Gallo, came to him with the idea of a sitcom, and English Teacher was the result.

What works is the writing. Alvarez picks up arguments most comedies avoid, what can be taught, who can kiss whom in a corridor, and gets a laugh out of them without picking a side or losing his nerve. He writes talk that overlaps and runs ahead of the audience, and Stephanie Koenig, his collaborator since the web series and a writer on the show as well, is the one who makes it sing: she and Alvarez have the rhythm of friends who have been finishing each other's sentences for years. We laughed out loud several times an episode, then found an hour later that we could not say what had happened in it. That is also the limit of the thing. Each episode deals with its argument and puts it down, nobody changes, and eight episodes pass without anyone losing anything. A second season of ten episodes followed, and the series ended after two.

The other limit is Alvarez the actor. Evan is the hardest person in the staffroom to believe in, and the people around him, Koenig, Enrico Colantoni's weary principal, Sean Patton's Markie, are easier company. In Adam Shankman's drag-queen disaster spoof of 2026 he plays Cal, and the film gives him nothing we remembered an hour later. On present evidence he is a writer who happens to perform, rather than the other way round.

The next thing he writes should have a smaller part for himself in it. Or a large one for Koenig, with Alvarez at the edge of the frame feeding her the lines.