'A Teacher': An Affair and a Series Out of Balance
0When a filmmaker newly arrived to television perceives the medium as “movies, but longer,” it typically means they don’t know or care about how to structure individual episodes, or why that matters. (Though in some cases, as with Luca Guadgnino and We Are Who We Are, those who talk the “10-hour movie” talk somehow walk the episodic walk.) With FX on Hulu’s A Teacher, however, the concept becomes quite literal — and not very effective. The 10-part limited series is Hannah Fidell’s adaptation of her own 2013 indie film about an affair between a high school senior and his English teacher. The film runs a scant 75 minutes, the TV version more than three times that. I haven’t seen the film (which is also streaming on Hulu, as well as Prime Video), but this take on the material consistently makes poor use of the extended time, wasting two strong lead performances by Kate Mara and Nick Robinson with a narrative approach that alternately feels labored and rushed. Mara plays the title character, Claire, new teacher at an Austin high school where Robinson’s Eric is a senior with dreams of matriculating at nearby University of Texas campus. Eric’s buddies are immediately transfixed by Claire — “Oh, she is way too hot to be a teacher,” drools Logan (Shane Harper) — but he finds himself drawn to her for reasons that go beyond skin-deep. She proves a good SAT tutor, and they bond over shared experience with worthless fathers (his walked out, while hers just climbed into a bottle). One by one, the professional and emotional boundaries between teacher and student fall away, until the two begin what each thinks of as a passionate, consensual affair between adults. Later, Claire will defend herself by pointing out that Eric was already 18 when they met, but does that really matter when she was there in loco parentis? Reviews 'Happiest Season': Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis Are Shoved Back Into the Closet for the Holidays Trailers of the Week: 'Assassins,' 'Fresh Prince,' 'Wild Mountain Thyme,' and More Reviews Keith Moon's 10 Wildest Pranks 32 Most Outrageous MTV VMAs Moments Episodes clock in around 30 minutes or less, which in theory makes sense for such a small and intimate story. But Fidell and her collaborators (including Gillian Robespierre, Andrew Neel, and producer Jason Bateman) are more interested in mood than in plot, which makes the early installments feel both slow and disproportionate. This is a show that really likes to linger on meaningful glances, or on one of its lead characters simply lost inside their own head. It’s obviously important for Fidell to show how gradually these two drift into an unhealthy situation. But dwelling on it for the majority of the season, despite the relationship only lasting weeks, and then racing through years’ worth of ugly aftermath in the last handful of episodes, gives too much weight to Eric’s mistaken belief that he’s in the middle of some fun, sexy times. The later episodes, which force