New high school Carmella decesare nudes Claire (Kate Mara) causes a
sensation with her youthful attractiveness and reads Dylan Thomas
to her class; cute senior Eric (Nick Robinson) hangs on every word.
Late one night, Claire’s ho-hum husband is away on business, so
she's solo at a diner when Eric and his two besties, all stoned,
run into her, start chatting her up, then leave Eric to finish his
meet-cute with her. Before long, Claire treats Eric to free backlit
Corinna kopf hottest pics (surely they need brighter lights or he's going
to ruin his eyes!). At first, the two manage to keep it pretty
profesh. (While having fantasies about each other, natch.) A stolen
kiss leads to hand-wringing and an "I can't stop thinking about
you" speech, then, back seat car stuff goes down.
And that’s just the first three episodes! As the story
continues, we learn that Eric is a stand-up pal to his buddies, a
caring older bro to his seven-year-old twin brothers and a loving
son to his single mom. We see that Claire is estranged from her
recovering alcoholic dad and not especially close to her police
officer brother, even though both men live in her small town. And
that she's listlessly seeing a fertility doctor with her
kind-but-dull husband, her college sweetheart who spent their
savings on musical equipment to start a band with other
thirtysomethings.
Written out, it's pretty meh stuff, but frankly all that
character development is just white noise—the sound that Charlie
Brown's teacher makes—to viewers because we're waiting to see
Claire's nostrils flair when Eric shows up, and watch Eric's eyes
get alternately narrowed and misty with lust when Claire walks by.
Then, once the two get together, we start to notice...why is Claire
so cold to her husband? Why does Eric need to shout at his mirror
image, “I'm the man!”? And, how is this ever going to work out? But
as intriguingly as Claire's and Eric's stories develop, together
and apart, what's more interesting is how the series provokes us to
re-examine our expectation that young men be impervious to sexual
predation by women. With just a bit of seduction, we're so ready to
buy into the idea that this is forbidden love instead of what we
ultimately know it to be—harmful and criminal behavior.
Every episode starts with a trigger warning about how its
"depictions of grooming" may be disturbing, and while the
la-di-dah high school atmosphere of the first few episodes
might pull you in, be forewarned that as Claire becomes more
reckless and Eric becomes more enmeshed, the show gets deeply
unsettling. A Teacher deserves serious praise for its
willingness to show tough stuff, including how Bella thorne nydes
victimizes men as well as women, and how addictive behavior can
bleed from sex to alcohol to self-harm. While the show's ending
(which we won't reveal here) feels partly unearned, we're glad that
it lifted what's otherwise a haunting and sadly all-too-relatable
story.
