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T.this is why A Teacher, a limited series on the relationship between a 30-year-old teacher and her 17-year-old student, uses the indefinite article. “A”, not “the” – a magnetic portrait of a black hole in a relationship, a deliberately restless exploration of a grooming case that seeks to represent so much more. The 10-part series, written and directed by Hannah Fidell based on her 2013 film of the same name, mirrors Hulu’s Normal People in its perspectives of a formative and inevitable relationship, but with an uncomfortably ruinous core.
In 20-25 minute episodes, A Teacher shows us what a transparent case of grooming should look like: Claire (Kate Mara), a new, silent and seemingly self-destructive high school English teacher in Austin, Texas, and her 17-year-old – old student turned lover, Eric (Love Simon’s Nick Robinson). Given the clear transgression of his premise, A Teacher is playing with fire, and he knows it: the show is steeped in warnings about grooming and resources to help, including the national hotline for RAINN; Mara filmed a PSA about sexual abuse before the show was released. But the series glows with flammable material, which is occasionally burned in the process. At best, A Teacher is a tense and uncomfortably absorbing portrait of obsession, a lively yet rooted escape into the dark depths of a relationship that, intelligently, especially for Eric, reflects on the cold shadow of what he’s been through. But the show’s good intentions and intentional discomfort – at some point, you’ll be cheering on Eric and Claire – are undermined by its heady sheen.
A Teacher draws a frantic arc: the first five episodes dive into their attraction, while Claire, smothered in her marriage to a loving but aloof musician, Matt (Ashley Zukerman), and no friends at work other than fellow teacher Kathryn (Marielle Scott ) intensifies inappropriate after-school mentoring sessions with Eric for sexual encounters. The second half of the season, after the relationship exposure, draws the long shadow of transgression, as Claire falters with scandal and accountability, and a tormented Eric, alienated from an experience few understand, tries to move on.
On paper, the relationship between Claire and Eric is clearly, unequivocally manipulative. As it was filmed, especially with the baby-faced but still 25-year-old Robinson in the lead role, their relationship – fleeting scenes of inexorable attraction, delicate close-ups of connections with clandestine cars, love scenes with the sound of a cover of Rihanna’s Stay – is communicated as sexy, seductive. This is the case regardless of the warnings attached to each episode, and this remains the case when the show’s final episode attempts to reverse the script on the dynamic of mutual attraction depicted in the first half of the season; without spoilers, the conclusion of the show, while Claire and especially Eric deal with the damage of what happened between them, jokes to the surface in an incomplete way, an attempt to screw one’s hook of an illicit relationship with moral consequences that they leave too invisible and unspoken.
This does not mean that the show is unsatisfactory, generative, sharper than it should be; A Teacher has one of the most micro-generationally scenes on the verge of a high school party – it’s set in 2013-2014, so Snapchat’s early years, Instagram’s second year, playlist distinctly falls in 2012 – of whatever I have seen on TV. The liberal use of a telephone screen, adjacent to the character lying on it, effectively founds Eric and Claire’s relationship in the all-too-real arena of digital pining; when Claire stops to accept Eric’s request on Instagram, the stakes are palpable. The very familiar aesthetic of the iPhone lock screens fixes the timeline of Eric and Claire’s relationship to the minute. Six weeks of involvement, the show reveals, can cost years.
Robinson, as Eric, is as convincing as an emotionally chaotic and confused teenager as a 25-year-old can be, even though his casting never allows the nausea of age difference to really land. Mara plays Claire as mostly inscrutable, and while there’s a lot to imagine in the thrift of the show, the gaps – what prompted Claire? Had he already done this or had he thought about it? How did you justify it? – make the second half’s showdown incomplete.
A charitable reading of this show, which after inspiring and then revising it, I am inclined to give, would be that A Teacher offers a more nuanced than expected portrayal of how, for Eric, his understanding of complicity, truth and guilt transforms over time. . and how our culture is poorly equipped to identify grooming, especially when the groomer is a woman; the show wisely follows Eric into his freshman year at the University of Texas, where he is hailed as a legend by brethren requesting details about Claire’s breast size.
In other words, there are many hooks in A Teacher: its pacing, poor representation of intoxication, and a particularly skillful performance by Robinson will likely allow viewers to map their own illicit obsessions and emotions onto the show’s limited duration. The confusion about how, exactly, we should feel Eric and Claire’s attraction is certainly provocative, but also short-circuiting. There is a lot of space to get lost in A Teacher; I just wish he would save more for redemption.
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