Late one night, Paul Simms had read everything there was to read on the internet and needed something to do. While scrolling on Twitter, he came across a link to The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo, a web series created by and starring Brian Jordan Alvarez. “I never watch web series,” Simms says now, “but I was like, All right, well, I’ve got nothing else to look at.” He started watching, then kept going. He saw what he now calls “a fully made TV star” and, even more important, a great comedy—“which shocked me, because most web series I see, you can sort of tell why they’re web series.”

Simms, who created the undersung ’90s classic NewsRadio and more recently served as an executive producer on Girls, Atlanta, and What We Do in the Shadows, reached out to his contacts to get in touch with Alvarez. They eventually connected on Zoom, and Simms told his potential new collaborator plainly: “Let’s make a real TV show.”

English Teacher (premiering its first two episodes September 2 on FX before streaming on Hulu the next day) introduces Alvarez’s distinctive sensibility to prime time, with the backing of one of TV’s most reliable comic writers. But it took Alvarez some convincing to go all in. “I had tried to make some things at this level, and I hadn’t been able to really navigate the system myself…. I was like…‘I couldn’t figure it out, and so I’m not really doing that anymore, but thanks,’” he says. “Paul was like, ‘No, we’re gonna do this. I’m gonna show you the ropes, I’m gonna guide you through this process, and we’re gonna get a show on TV.’ And he delivered on his promise extraordinarily.”

Alvarez’s idea for the show stemmed from a common theme in his work: “people trying to do the right thing, but not knowing if they’re doing it the right way…or if they’re achieving the right thing through questionable means.” The series is set at a public high school in Austin, Texas, and centers on Alvarez’s Evan Marquez as he navigates intraschool dramas, troubled students, brazenly involved parents, and the friction of living inside a liberal bubble in a conservative state. The pilot examines the fallout from a student seeing Evan kiss his boyfriend. The second episode follows a drag queen, played by Trixie Mattel, teaching a group of football players how to amp up their cheer bona fides for a politicized powder-puff game. (“Trixie Mattel was number one on the list,” Simms says.)

“People from every different part of life are basically forced to come together for a common goal, which is just to educate these kids,” Alvarez says. “What we enjoy is this idea that obviously the teachers are teaching the kids, but sometimes the kids are teaching the teachers how to live in this modern world that’s moving so fast, [where] it feels like the rules change every day.”

Alvarez and Simms leaned on the perspectives of friends who are teachers, writers in the show’s room who are younger than them, and their own memories of high school. These were all fused with a send-up of “the silly, tribalistic fighting of the times that we live in—[where] even if you’re not in a school, everyone’s against everyone else,” Simms says. He teases an episode tackling gun violence and safety—an obviously sensitive topic—that he hopes subverts expectations. That goes for the whole show. The mantra Alvarez and Simms quickly agreed on was simple: English Teacher should not feel like homework.

“We don’t want the show to feel like we’re preaching at anyone or that we have any political agenda: Both sides have their points. Both sides act idiotically at different times,” Simms says. “In the last 10 years or so, there’ve been a lot of shows that are trying to fucking teach you something…. [They’ve] felt like medicine and they forget to be funny or fun.” Both he and Alvarez describe English Teacher as intentionally broad. “The show is welcoming, the show is for everybody—and something I’ve often thought about is: This show isn’t mad at you,” Alvarez says.

“We wanted it to be smart and ‘irreverent,’” Simms adds. “Please put the quotation marks around that, because it’s such an overused word.”

“I’m terminally online and I’m relatively big on TikTok,” Alvarez tells me. (He has a hair under 700,000 followers, to be exact.) He says this in response to a question about his perspective on the modern high school, though without context it might sound slightly beside the point. But English Teacher does operate within that warped, screen-time-heavy worldview. Students film teachers with their phones. Culture-war topics get weaponized for grade improvements on an essay. The very notion of public education is up for partisan debate.

Alvarez’s understanding of this reality is heartfelt and nuanced. The New York–born writer and actor has built a steady, high-profile screen presence, from sharp guest turns on Will & Grace and Jane the Virgin to his role in the booming M3GAN franchise. (He’s in New Zealand when we speak, shooting the horror phenomenon’s anticipated sequel.) But he’s come into his own through relatively independent endeavors. His face-filtered pop-star alter ego, TJ Mack, went viral last year with the single (it’s a single, right?) “Sitting,” a culmination of years of brazen internet musical comedy. And while Caleb Gallo isn’t his only web series, its sweetly surreal spin on a frank portrait of queerness reflects his strengths both behind and in front of the camera.

“Something that’s unique to what I like to do is [that] my comedy lets itself slow down and settle down and have real moments of heart and emotion,” Alvarez says. He cites 30 Rock and Arrested Development as “the end-all-be-all” of sitcoms, hoping to approach their sheer joke-a-minute volume in his own tone and style. Working with a TV network for the first time—a network primed for a major showing at this year’s Emmys—he found the back-and-forth with not just the executives, but also veterans of the medium like Simms and director Jonathan Krisel (Baskets), gratifyingly productive.

“They’re on a winning streak for a reason. You have these notes calls, and you’re listening and you’re going, ‘Yeah, that will make it better,’” Alvarez says. “And then you go and you do it, and you make the show better.”

English Teacher anchors its story in the teachers’ interpersonal dynamics. We get to know Evan through his relatively optimistic best friend, Gwen (Alvarez’s frequent collaborator Stephanie Koenig), who teaches history. You feel their bond instantly. “The chemistry they have together is something that you often aspire to, but you can’t fake,” Simms says. “You need people that have known each other that long and have worked together that well.” There’s also PE teacher Markie (Sean Patton), who presents as a jock—a trope Simms particularly loves to play with: “In the first 30 seconds, you want people to go, I know exactly what that guy is. That guy is a dumb redneck. Then you see that there is depth and complexity to him.”

Both Alvarez and Simms recognize English Teacher’s salience; it will premiere only two months before the US presidential election. There’s some inevitable overlap in terms of subject matter. “I hope people see the show as a microcosm of all the stupid arguments that everyone’s having with each other all the time,” Simms says. Alvarez concurs, while also signaling that the show ought to be able to rise above any reductive, issue-driven reading. “We can handle pretty big topics, but we do so not only quite lightly and joyously, but also from so many different angles,” he says. “I feel like you can watch this with your grandparents and your parents. That’s my hope for the show.”