At its core, AP Bio tells the story of Jack Griffin, a disgraced Harvard philosophy scholar who returns to his hometown of Toledo, Ohio after losing his dream job. Instead of teaching Advanced Placement Biology, Jack uses his students to carry out revenge plots and petty schemes against his academic rival. The premise sounds like a throwaway sitcom idea, but AP Bio takes it in an entirely different direction. The show isn’t about education at all. It’s about failure, ego, and the absurdity of adulthood.
Glenn Howerton, best known for his sociopathic turn as Dennis on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, plays Jack with a similar blend of arrogance and self-loathing. He’s a man who knows he’s brilliant and cannot stand the fact that his life has gone nowhere. What makes the character work isn’t his intelligence or cruelty but his vulnerability. Jack’s intellectual superiority is a mask for profound insecurity, and AP Bio is at its best when it peels that mask back.
Around him, the show builds a world of lovable weirdos. Patton Oswalt’s Principal Durbin is the perfect comic foil, a man so earnest that he manages to make bureaucracy seem wholesome. The students, meanwhile, start off as stereotypes, the overachiever, the outcast, the social climber, but over time they become the heart of the show. Their gradual development gives AP Bio a surprising emotional depth, especially as they begin to see Jack for who he really is: a broken man trying to feel important again.
The brilliance of AP Bio lies in its tone. It mixes cynical humor with philosophical reflection in a way few sitcoms dare to attempt. Each episode is packed with absurd situations, a revenge PowerPoint, a fake cult, a home invasion gone wrong, but the chaos often points to something deeper. The show constantly asks questions about meaning, success, and self-worth, often through the lens of a character who claims to care about nothing. It’s a comedy that hides existential despair beneath punchlines, and somehow makes that funny.
Unfortunately, AP Bio never quite found its audience. NBC canceled it after two seasons before Peacock revived it for streaming, only to cancel it again after season four. In the era of algorithm-driven content and instant gratification, AP Bio’s offbeat tone and slow-burn character development were easy to overlook. It wasn’t flashy or sentimental, and it didn’t beg for attention. It just existed, quietly confident in its own odd brilliance.
Looking back, AP Bio feels like a show made for people who are too smart to take television too seriously but too jaded to watch anything earnest. It’s a satire of ambition wrapped in a farce about failure. And in an entertainment landscape filled with self-importance, that might be its greatest strength.
Jack Griffin doesn’t learn biology, and he certainly doesn’t teach it. But AP Bio teaches something better: that sometimes the smartest people make the dumbest choices, and that redemption can come from the least likely places, even a Toledo classroom full of kids who just wanted to pass a test.
So if you missed AP Bio the first time around, it’s worth a second look. It’s not just a comedy about a bad teacher. It’s a reminder that brilliance can be messy, failure can be funny, and the smartest show on TV might be the one that pretends not to care.
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