NEW YORK, NY.- For over a decade, Brian Jordan Alvarez has been bootstrapping his way across platforms and screens big and small, collecting fans and followers.

In the early days, he starred with friends in short comedic sketches he posted on YouTube. Then in 2016, on a paltry budget of around $10,000, he created “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo,” a five-part comedy web series about a misfit group of queer friends in Los Angeles. Alvarez wrote and directed it, and starred as the title character.

“Caleb Gallo” quickly found an audience. It was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City that year, earned a Gotham Award nomination and topped IndieWire’s list of best web series of 2016, edging out Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” The next year, Alvarez landed a recurring role in the three-season revival of “Will & Grace” as the fiance, then husband, of Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes).

In 2023 he leveled up again, starring alongside Allison Williams in the horror comedy box office smash “M3gan” and reaching new heights of virality with a stable of absurdist face-filtered characters. The most famous of them, bug-eyed, duck-lipped pop star TJ Mack, delighted millions on TikTok and Instagram with the earworm “Sitting” (pronounced “Sittim”).

Now Alvarez is taking another major leap: “English Teacher,” a feel-good sitcom with an edge that he created and stars in, debuts Monday on FX.

“I am this sort of hybrid, you know, or maybe I’m just an artist at work,” he said in a video interview from New Zealand, where he was filming the sequel to “M3gan.”

The sitcom stars Alvarez as Evan Marquez, a stubborn but charming English teacher at a high school in Austin, Texas, where he navigates relationships with friends, colleagues, students and their parents. The cast includes comics and character actors like Enrico Colantoni, Sean Patton and Carmen Christopher as well as Stephanie Koenig, Alvarez’s longtime collaborator and close friend, as Gwen Sanders, Evan’s best friend and fellow teacher.

“English Teacher” joins a growing canon of hopeful-mentor sitcoms that includes “Abbott Elementary” and “Ted Lasso.” (Its language and themes keep it firmly in the TV-MA realm, though.)

“English Teacher” diverges from those shows by marrying laughs with hot-button topics: In the second episode, Trixie Mattel (perhaps the most famous drag artist in the world aside from RuPaul) guest stars as a “drag football coach”; the fourth episode focuses on guns in schools; and throughout the season, Evan grapples with what it means to be a gay educator in the South.

The show strives to not be preachy and mostly avoids hammering home any specific points of view. The students’ perspectives are as central as those of the teachers, creating a kind of ongoing conversation about so-called woke and anti-woke dynamics.

Alvarez, 37, was born in Manhattan but was raised primarily in Tennessee, which informed the show’s Texas setting.

“I have a lot of love for the South,” he said. “I also sort of knew, well, my mom’s Colombian, so we’re not quite from here. So I think you can feel that in the show, too.”

His mother is also an educator, as is his sister, and he’s had a lifelong affinity for teaching.

“It’s sort of in my blood, and I’ve never done it,” he said. “It’s that thing where somebody says, ‘I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.’”

A school is also an ideal setting for a TV show, he said, because it’s a snapshot of the larger world.

“This particular environment is such a good opportunity to put people together who normally wouldn’t choose to interact,” he said. “People from every different part of life are forced to come together — and not just come together but come together for a common purpose of educating these kids.”

While a big focus in the writers room was how to talk about risky topics, the show’s warmth comes from the core friendships. That is one of Alvarez’s signature moves, going back to his early web video days, Koenig said.

“It’s a product of him growing up with movies in the ’80s and being a big fan of ‘Dirty Dancing’ and feel-good movies like ‘Ghost’ and ‘Sister Act,’ where there’s always a good ending,” she said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home.

Koenig, who played Alvarez’s best friend in “Caleb Gallo,” met him while they were both in their early 20s. She was new to Los Angeles and was struggling to land acting jobs when she met Alvarez through a friend who was making a short student film.

After their first meeting, Koenig recalled, she felt that “I met a co-partner, somebody who really made me feel inspired.” They worked together steadily from then on, strengthening both their friendship and their craft.

“We became each other’s muses,” said Koenig, who also recently starred in the Apple TV+ drama “Lessons in Chemistry” and the Max thriller “The Flight Attendant.”

Koenig said Alvarez’s trick is to always push a joke or a story into an unexpected place, no matter the project or the medium.

“It’s never a take that everybody else would see,” she said. “It always takes a left turn and keeps surprising you.”

Alvarez and Koenig heaped praise onto the entire cast and crew of “English Teacher.” Alvarez said his fellow executive producers, Paul Simms, Jonathan Krisel and Dave King, empowered him to lead his first full-fledged TV series while ensuring that he maintained the distinct comedic sensibility that his online fans, especially, have grown attached to.

“Each step along the way, I would check in and say, ‘This still does have that essence, that golden thread at the center,’” Alvarez said.

Creating a show for a major cable network wasn’t without its jitters. When Alvarez felt them mostly acutely, he’d remind himself: “I’ve had enough amateur practice rounds of this to know what I’m doing.”

“I think the hardest part is how early the calls are,” he said with a laugh. “I have to be at my own set at 5 a.m. Can I tell someone to make this 9 a.m.?”

He worries less about the distinctions between online video and the more traditional format of a sitcom. “I’ve had different audiences at different times. This again is just a different audience,” he said.

“There were people that used to watch my YouTube sketches who then years later would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize you were on TikTok,’” he explained. “And there are people that are into these TikTok characters I do that go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you used to do YouTube videos.’”

As for the future of his characters like TJ Mack, anything is possible, he said.

“It’d be fun to make them into their own sort of sketch TV show or something adjacent to that, but I’m also happy with how it is right now,” he added. “As long as you guys are entertained by this, then good.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.