Everybody's learning

We've seen school sitcoms before. English Teacher (Disney+ Hotstar), created by and starring Brian Jordan Alvarez, begins innocuously, almost mundanely, with the chalk-and-dust trope of a dedicated but beleaguered high school teacher. From the moment Alvarez's protagonist Mr Todd steps into his classroom, sporting a cardigan as square as his earnestness, the series flips the script on the genre and delivers something fresh, meaningful, and unabashedly smart.

- RAJA SEN

English Teacher could be compared to the feel-good stylings of Abbott Elementary (Disney+ Hotstar) and even the underrated AP Bio (Netflix), a series I would immediately recommend to lovers of 30 Rock. Starring Glenn Howerton (from the great It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) as a disgraced—and perpetually enraged—Harvard professor teaching schoolkids things they should not learn, AP Bio has many silly charms.

While Abbott is content being a light-hearted crowd-pleaser and AP Bio revels in loopiness, English Teacher interrogates the reality of high schools today. It engages with the complex lives of its students—their slang, their TikTok-fuelled activism, their razor-sharp ability to spot hypocrisy. This is closer to the brilliance and incisiveness of American Vandal (Netflix) than to most school-based sitcoms. In Alvarez's world, young people are not props for punchlines but fully realised characters, messy, rebellious and opinionated.

In the opening episode, teachers discuss how students have shed some of their "woke" sheen. Now teenagers—armed with sardonic smirks and chaotic non-cooperative energy—demand lessons in "both sides" of the Spanish Inquisition, a request so absurdly postmodern that Todd can't tell if it's satire or sociopathy. The chasm between idealistic millennials and the cynical, irony-drenched zoomers, already well-documented in memes, finds a most articulate rendering.