English Teacher season two on Disney: Under-the-radar TV comedy you should be watching

If not for the sheer volume of new series clamouring for attention, English Teacher would surely be a bigger sensation.

But there is also something special about a show that only the discerning few know about. There’s that underdog cache that makes you feel part of the chosen elite, of the select versus the masses.

You don’t get any props for being a Wednesday fan (before the disappointing second season, who the hell wasn’t?) but if you can recite in order of release every Agnes Varda movie, then you get to be in the cool club. Right?

At least that’s the story you can use to frame around English Teacher, an under-seen, very clever and very funny series that returns for its second season this week. It’s OK that it doesn’t have the wide audience it deserves because if you know, you know. You know?

If you missed the first batch last year, English Teacher is a half-hour streaming comedy set in Austin, Texas (a town that is often considered to be the progressive outpost of an otherwise generally conservative US state), centred on the character of Evan Marquez (Brian Jordan Alvarez), a high school English teacher.

Evan is what his friend and colleague, Principal Grant Moretti (Enrico Colantoni) calls a giant pain in the arse because he refuses to toe the line and is always pushing on behalf of his students, even if his good intentions go haywire, as they generally do because you wouldn’t have a TV show without conflict.

In that first season, that included an episode where he facilitated the football players to do drag. Everything didn’t go exactly as Evan planned but despite everything, there’s still a lot of perspective-opening to go around.

In this 10-episode second season, six of which were available for review, Evan is still fighting the good fight, but there’s a slight softening in how much he’s learning from his students as he is giving to them.

Whether that’s accepting, eventually, the class’s desire to co-opt the seminal Tony Kushner play Angels in America to tell a story about their Covid experiences, or how he comes to terms with his discovery that he was a “diversity hire” while coaching kids on university applications.

Just as it did before, English Teacher draws on so-called hot-button issues – army recruitment, DEI, Big Tech and privacy, sexuality – to create episodes that tackle them without ever feeling like it’s a lecture.

Comedy, assailed as it is in the purported land of the free, is often best-positioned for exactly this purpose, and English Teacher knows how to provoke a conversation while still undercutting earnestness by slapping itself in the face.

It’s also the ensemble around Evan, including fellow teachers Gwen (Stephanie Koenig), Markie (Sean Patton), counsellor Rick (Carmen Christopher), Evan’s boyfriend Malcolm (Jordan Firstman), and the always put-upon Principal Moretti.

When you’re a kid at school, even if you didn’t like your educators, you assume they more or less had it together as adults, but as English Teacher shows us, everyone is still trying to figure it out.

You may be an authority figure over youngsters, trying to guide them through adolescence, but that doesn’t mean you’re not always learning.

Perhaps more than the witty one-liners or the often absurd situations the characters find themselves in, what English Teacher does best is reminds us that we’re all still just becoming. To borrow life wisdom from Buffy, we’re not done baking.

English Teacher is on Disney+ from September 26