English Teacher Season 1 Recap: Key Highlights Before Season 2 Premiere(Photo Credit –Prime Video)
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FX’s The English Teacher is set to premiere its second season on September 25. The series was created by Brian Jordan Alvarez, who also stars as the lead character Evan Marquez, who’s a teacher at Morrison-Henley High School. The first season of English Teacher premiered on September 2, 2024, and ran for eight episodes until October 14 of that year.
English Teacher’s first season followed Evan Marquez’s first days at the Morrison-Henley high school as he adjusted to his duties and the dysfunction surrounding the place. Read on to learn everything there is to know about season 1, in anticipation of season 2’s release.
English Teacher Season 1 Introduces Morrison-Henley High School
English Teacher season 1 serves as the introduction to Morrison-Henley High School. The early episodes of the season deal with LGBT themes, as Evan gets into hot water as a result of a mother filing a complaint against him for kissing his ex-boyfriend, Malcolm, in front of the students. The scandal gets quashed once the gym teacher, Markie, discovers that the mother’s son is gay and threatens to expose that fact.
Evan faces another issue when an LGBT advocacy group lashes out at the school’s powderpuff practice, and Evan brings a drag queen friend of his along in order to teach the students about drag culture and performance. Evan also continues to struggle with his sexuality after crossing paths with Harry, an attractive male teacher he’s developed a crush on.
Eventually, Harry reveals to Evan that he’s also gay, and the two briefly kiss, but Evan remains wary of accepting his advances. Meanwhile, the school has to deal with Markie trying to revive the gun club, to which Evan retaliates by organizing a protest with students of the book club.
Evan ultimately ends up resorting to underhanded means to shut down the gun club by asking his students to write about the heinous crimes they’d commit if they could get away with it, and using their submissions to “prove” that the gun club is an imminent threat, though this also has the side effect of the teachers, including him, having to take firearms training lessons.
As the season draws to a close, Evan ends up in another confrontation with Linda Harrison, the angry parent who antagonized him at the start of the series. After he fails much of his class for bungling his essay assignment on The Red Badge of Courage, and Linda escalates matters to the point of organizing a parent-teacher town hall to put Evan on blast. Evan eventually decides to redo the assignment, not wanting to drag out the fight any longer.
In the penultimate episode, Evan gets an offer from his old friend Pasha, who has a position open at an energy company. Realizing that he doesn’t like the work culture of Pasha’s company, Evan sticks to his high school teaching job. The season ends with Evan celebrating his 35th birthday and reconciling with Malcolm.
