AP Bio Season One Review

Knowing that his days on dark sitcom behemoth ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” are numbered, Glenn Howerton takes a cue from co-star Kaitlin Olsen and makes a lateral move by transferring the same comi-sociopathic screen persona into a new sitcom arena.

“AP Bio” is a fun show with a premise that doesn’t hold up to any level of scrutiny. If you can get past the latter, you’ll be able to enjoy the former. It’s one thing to con your way into a teaching job and not care about doing it once you get there (the most notable example being “Bad Teacher”). It’s another to actively want to prevent your students from learning when it’s so much easier just to let them open their text books and read on their own.

The deal Howerton’s character, Jack, makes with his students is that he’ll give them an automatic A if they don’t rat out his anti-learning methods to the well-intentioned-but-aloof Principal Durbin. What about the AP exam or whatever 200-level biology class they might take in college? What about the fact that Jack regularly threatens Fs when he’s upset?  Watching Jack be so casually erratic and cruel is surely funny, but the show falls apart when the reasons his students don’t rat him out are so paper-thin.

For all of its celebration of Jack’s cruelty, the episodes have followed a bit of a TGIF-template wherein Jack softens at the end of the episode. He generally realizes his mistake and makes up for it somehow. This is all well and good, but the cycle of unfeeling task master to atoner and back to monster at the start of each new episode starts to wear thin by episode’s end. It's clear that the show is trying to have its cake and eat it too after a certain point, by making Jack evil with a capital E (in the latest episode, it's revealed that he is a highly competent at teaching biology after all) but also having him learn and grow. "AP Bio" desperately needs to split the difference.

The best that the show does on this front is to show that Jack's not as completely devoid of feelings as his alter-ego Dennis Reynolds at times. In the episode where he dates a single mom, he does discover within himself that he's enamored (or "freakin' enamored" as the episode is titled) and he's slightly more up front with his own parental issues and psychological baggage then Dennis. Still, it's not always entirely convincing that Jack exists other than as an ersatz for Dennis. 

It’s also worth noting, the show has some amazing features in the background. The multi-racial Greek chorus of teachers (Mary Sohn, Lyric Lewis, Jean Villepique) who have not yet caught on to the fact that Jack is a con-artist but provide him with sufficient enough foils, have a great chemistry and dialogue. If this show is any bit of a downer, they add  a level of upbeat energy. Additionally, the show could just as easily be about the kids since there are so many different shades  of color (Heather needs an upgrade to full cast member, spin-off, and so much more) and humor from the rapidly developing group of students.