FX officially pulled the plug on English Teacher after two seasons, announcing the cancellation six weeks after the sophomore season premiered – and just days after resurfaced sexual-assault allegations against creator and star Brian Jordan Alvarez hit the timeline like a rogue Google doc nobody asked for, but everyone clicked anyway.

A spokesperson for Alvarez denied the claims. FX gave no official reason for the cancellation. But in 2025, we know how to read context clues. And this context was bold, italic, and in 72-point font.

But listen… even before the allegations made everything uncomfortably clear, English Teacher was already spiraling like a sophomore-year lit student who just discovered Foucault and thinks power only exists if you smoke a cigarette while referencing it.

And trust me – I wanted to love Season 2. I really did.

Season 1 had me ready to write think pieces about queer pedagogy, workplace absurdism, and the chaotic brilliance of watching adults collapse under the weight of adolescent critique. I was prepared to defend the show to my tias, cite it in my PhD program, maybe even sneak it into a lecture on media ecosystems and emotional capture. It had that potential.

Then Season 2 arrived… and suddenly we were in a different show altogether.

Season 2 Feels Like Being Bullied in Middle School

The jokes get deeper, stranger, and also meaner. Not smart-mean. Not satire-mean. Just cafeteria-table-with-nowhere-to-sit mean.

Alvarez’s character goes from “lovable disaster who fights back with neurotic charm” to “grown man desperately trying to pledge to the Bro-Code Brotherhood of America.” The emotional throughline? Gone. The resistance? Evaporated. The point? Missing.

Every episode, the main character keeps trying to assimilate into a system that clearly does not want him, instead of questioning why he feels compelled to belong in the first place.

It’s Colonial Stockholm Syndrome here too – the season bends over backwards to appease the very culture it claims to critique. Instead of dismantling power, it courts it. Instead of resisting the “dominant narrative,” it tries to get invited to its pool party. This is assimilation drag, and honestly, the wig is sliding.

Charisma? Yes. Coping Skills? Absolutely Not.

Yes, the characters are still messy, relatable, unhinged in delicious ways. But it’s 2025. Can we at least pretend we have the emotional tools to self-interrogate for more than 17 seconds?

Instead, every character behaves like they are allergic to introspection. Not in a funny “oh wow, this is satire” way. In a “why do all of you need HR, a therapist, a union rep, and a nap?” way.

The refusal to self-dissect makes the show feel like a time capsule from a pre-pandemic, pre-mutual-aid, pre-Latiné-in-therapy era. I kept wanting someone – anyone – to ask: ¿Pero por qué soy así? But no one ever did.

The Students are the Season’s Brightest Moments

This season, the only time I laugh with instead of at the show is during the chaotic, unpredictable conversations between students and faculty. Those moments remind me – with both pride and mild arthritis – that I am a Xenial lost in the sauce of Gen Z++ youth culture.

Their dynamic gives the show the generational contrast that Season 1 used so well: the absurdity of being the “adult” in a world where the kids often have more sense, more clarity, and more radical imagination.

But the show doesn’t build on that. It just sprinkles it on top like cilantro and hopes we don’t notice the rest of the meal’s got no seasoning.

A Symptom of the Industry’s Rotten Infrastructure

The allegations against Alvarez, made by his former friend and collaborator Jon Ebeling, cast a long shadow over the show’s future, its past, and its entire ethos. When the creator becomes the crisis, the work can’t escape the ruin.

Hollywood has a long history of protecting the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable.

That’s not new. That’s not surprising.

That’s not even a plot twist.

But the timing of FX’s cancellation – quiet, swift, conspicuously reason-less – reveals an ecosystem still terrified of accountability yet constantly reacting to it. It’s the DRIP Cycle (Disinformation → Repetition → Internalization → Propaganda) but in corporate PR form: release nothing, repeat nothing, hope the audience internalizes silence as strategy.

Spoiler: we don’t.

So, Where Does English Teacher Go in the Cultural Archive?

Season 1: Inventive, deeply funny, sharply queer, promising.

Season 2: A case study in emotional collapse, narrative retreat, and assimilation into the systems the characters once resisted.

The Cancellation? Necessary, inevitable, and overshadowed by something far more serious than a failing season.

Ultimately, English Teacher will be remembered as a show that could have pushed boundaries – but instead folded into them. A show that flirts with critique but chooses comfort. A show that had brilliance in its hands, then trades it for bro-energy and obliviousness.

Somewhere in another timeline, Season 3 would’ve been the breakthrough, the accountability arc, the course correction.

But in this one?

FX dropped the class mid-semester. Honestly? Same.