Quirky series leads (slowly) to cable success

Imagine you’re a young writer/actor, long on ideas and short on opportunity.
You could take the approach of Brian Jordan Alvarez. He made a quirky, low-budget digital series; praise and a big-time cable series followed promptly.
Well, semi-promptly. Alvarez’s “English Teacher” (shown here) debuts at 10 p.m. ET Monday (Sept. 2) on FX … eight years after his “The Gay and Wonderful Life of Caleb Gallo” was named the year’s best web series.
“I had sort of tried to make my way through the studio system,” said Alvarez, 37. “And I had failed in a variety of ways. I really couldn’t figure out how to get through it.”
Fortunately, , Paul Simms knew the route. Simms had taken a well-trod path – Harvard Lampoon to Letterman to HBO shows and beyond. Lately, he has executive produced two of FX’s best shows – “Atlanta” and (currently) “What We Do in the Shadows.”
Simms saw “Caleb Gallo” five years after it debuted. By then, Alvarez’s efforts as a writer-producer had sputtered, but his acting career was fine. He’d done 13 episodes of the “Will & Grace” reboot as Jack’s boyfriend (and, eventually, husband). He was one of the stars of the “M3GAN” movie and he did lots of TV guest shots.
“I was like, ‘I’m acting now,’” Alvarez said. “And Paul was really like, ‘No, I see what you’ve done here. I see this is a unique thing and I’m going to show you the ropes.’”
Three years later they have a short season, with eight half-hours – two on Sept. 2, then one each Monday — set in a high school. “It’s a place where people from every background are forced to interact,” Alvarez said.
The first three episodes focus heavily on the fact that Evan (Alvarez) is an openly gay teacher in a modern school. But they also satirize the teen hipness and lingo. It’s “about what are we allowed to say anymore and what’s right and what’s wrong these days,” Simms said.
The gym teacher (played by Sean Patton) says the wrong things — even calling Evan “Froot Loops” – but he’s Evan’s friend, with surprising insights. Another teacher (Stephanie Koenig, shown here with Alvarez, her long-time colleague) is Evan’s close friend.
Then there’s the principal. He “tries to contain these tiger cubs into a box and is always getting bitten,” said Enrico Colantoni, who plays him.
That’s in a suburb of Austin, Texas. “It’s this sort of liberal place, in a very conservative larger place,” Alvarez said. “That’s similar to where I grew up.”
He’s from Winchester, a Tennessee county seat, with 9.400 people. His dad was an electrical engineer, his mom (with Colombian roots) was a Spanish teacher. Alvarez was sometimes bullied for being gay, he has said, but then he “went to high school in this little town called Sewanee, … a highly liberal spot in very conservative Tennessee.”
That town of 2,500, near Winchester, is the home of the University of the South, a small (1,700-student) school. Jordan went to its high school and to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and the University of Southrn California, always focusing on theater.
Then he went on to the tenuous world of show business. He made shorts, made web series and scored with “Caleb Gallo,” which led to his own cable series … a mere eight years later.