From A Teacher to BoJack Horseman, TV took a more holistic approach to #MeToo stories in 2020

The A.V. Club

"Both the final half-season of BoJack Horseman and the limited series A Teacher recounted abuse and even broached the possibility of redemption," says Danette Chavez. "Perhaps most strikingly, both shows showed the aftermath of abuse, for both the perpetrators and the survivors. At a time when the desire for comfort drives viewing habits, BoJack Horseman and A Teacher urged audiences to sit with their discomfort over who we’re prepared to forgive and who we see as victims. BoJack’s morose horse protagonist seemed on track for a redemption arc in the first half of season six. After months in rehab, BoJack (Will Arnett) gained valuable insight into his self-destructive behavior. The not-entirely-washed-up actor began to see what’s been clear to audiences since season one: Being a survivor of abuse doesn’t excuse his own abusive behavior, and his celebrity status, which was his shield for so long, has actually thwarted his development. By midseason, a sober BoJack had rebuilt his life away from the limelight, teaching acting to Wesleyan students. His younger sister, Hollyhock (Aparna Nancherla), was happy to see him when he first visited Connecticut, and his relationships with Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie), Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), and Todd Chavez (Aaron Paul), while somewhat strained, were far from over. Given BoJack’s offenses—trying to have sex with his former crush’s teen daughter, encouraging a recovering addict to go on a bender with him, being high at work and strangling his co-star—it was as close to a happy ending as he probably deserved...Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher, which premiered November 10 on FX on Hulu, heads toward similar territory, though it takes a very different path to get there. Fidell’s expanded her character study from 2013 into a quietly powerful rumination on who is viewed as a victim and who is deemed a predator. The limited series centers on Claire (Kate Mara), an attractive 30-something teacher painfully aware of the rut she’s in, but too invested in her self-denial to change anything. Her life is full of obligations, not aspirations; it always has been, Claire thinks, as she’s had to put everyone else’s needs before her own. So convinced of her own altruism is she that when she meets Eric (Nick Robinson), a prepossessing high school senior, Claire almost immediately offers to tutor him for the SATs. And because she continues to believe she has very little control over her life, it’s years before she’s able to see that she was already exerting undue influence over a teenager."

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• A Teacher will stir awareness of the insidious patterns of abuse, but its storytelling doesn’t rise to the complexity of its subject matter: "Claire and Eric feel like stock characters who have been designed with a post-show roundtable discussion in mind," says Doreen St. Félix. "They are sophisticated banalities—improvements on past tropes, but banalities nonetheless. It seems wrong to watch A Teacher on anything other than a TV cart that has been rolled into fourth-period health class. That’s not to say it isn’t watchable. It is—compulsively so. Mara and Robinson are both excellent at committing to their characters’ delusions. The series is also stodgily linear, more like a film than a collection of episodes, and so getting sucked in is a simple matter of gravity. There is a compelling friction, too, in the occasional clash of genre; the grim drama sometimes drifts into a register of campy degradation that’s reminiscent of Lifetime movies and We TV shows. I found myself clinging to every jock’s clichéd invocation of Ms. Wilson’s hotness. Satire can be a defter tool than condemnation."
• A Teacher tries to cover a lot of ground very quickly, but as a result, it feels as if, in a matter of days, Claire goes from new teacher to sexual predator