Making it steamy in the classrooms

It was David Lee Roth who said it best: We are, as a people, hot for teacher. On “The Bedford Diaries,” an ostensibly ridiculous but subtly intelligent soap debuting Wednesday on the WB, Matthew Modine plays a college professor named Jake Macklin who teaches a seminar called “Sexual Behavior and the Human Condition.” Hint: It’s an elective. “This classroom will be a forum for revelation and personal exploration,” he tells his students, which turns out to be a dressy way of saying go home and talk into your video camera about your sex life and have the tapes to me by next Thursday.

Though Macklin isn’t an on-campus lothario preying on students (that one’s here, but as a side character), he oozes innuendo in the classroom. Apparently, there’s no getting around this stuff: Student-teacher affairs have become a cable news template, the implicit porn fantasy competing with the tsk-tsks. When charges were dropped last week against Debra Lafave, the former Florida middle school teacher charged with sexual abuse for sleeping with her 14-year-old student, Fox News showed a picture of Lafave sitting astride a motorcycle in her underwear, which didn’t conjure abuse so much as it did a calendar.

Even a lighthearted show like the new NBC sitcom “Teachers” blows past the issue of sex in the workplace when the workplace is school. “Teachers,” premiering tonight, re-imagines Hawkeye Pierce as an attractive young high school English teacher with a carpe diem attitude in the teachers lounge, where he pinballs between a sexy, buttoned-up blond and a sexy new substitute who has no use for buttons, and who has become a teacher because “beer don’t pay for itself.”

Too true. Nor do video cameras, though the college students on “Bedford Diaries” -- who include a Jim Morrison-looking freshman named Owen (Penn Badgley), and his pert older sister Sarah (Tiffany Dupont) -- gamely press “record” and begin talking, slowly, about sex and life and love.

In the pilot, anyway, you will wait in vain for the scene in which an irate parent gets wind of Macklin’s assignment and calls the dean’s office. The unlikely co-creator and executive producer of “Bedford Diaries” is Tom Fontana, the hepcat of a TV writer-producer whose credits include the HBO prison drama “Oz” and the acclaimed cop drama “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

Fontana’s previous series, ABC’s “The Jury,” was a failure, but “Bedford Diaries” is worth it, a truer-than-you-might expect colloquy on young people and sexuality in the vein of “My So-Called Life.”

The actors are all pretty, of course, but with intelligence in their eyes, and in Bedford University, Fontana and co-creator Julie Martin have conjured a New York City boutique campus where the Feminist Lesbian Majority is protesting gender profiling by campus police while another group is trying to save Mexican turtles whose eggs are being used as an aphrodisiac said to be “more potent than Viagra.”

The show is observationally comedic in this way -- the folkie in the coffeehouse is hilariously earnest -- and slyly caustic. “Bedford Diaries” made news last week when the Federal Communications Commission, having fined CBS $3.6 million for a teen-orgy plot line on an episode of “Without a Trace,” also moved the WB to edit out two brief scenes in “Bedford,” one in which a girl begins to put her hands down her pants to masturbate, straightforwardly and without video equipment, and another in which two drunk girls make out in a bar.

Fontana, on his shows, likes to establish the line you can’t cross on TV by simply crossing it. He’s a Bill Maher of dramatic TV, itching to run afoul of standards and practices. But “Bedford” is a substantive romp, a kind of “Sex and the Little Ivy,” in which the editor of the student newspaper is sleeping with Macklin’s ex-wife, and Sarah is rising above the attachment feelings from her ill-fated affair with a married English professor.

She’s the good girl here. Her kid brother Owen, meanwhile, has had mountains of high school conquests by the time he falls for Natalie (Corri English), an older girl who attempted suicide by jumping off the top of her dorm.

“A girl who would jump off of a roof,” he says admiringly to his video camera. “There is something very hot about that kind of crazy

He trails off. The sex is all presented straightforwardly, without tidy repercussions or deep moralizing. That “Bedford Diaries” became a headline in a brief culture-war skirmish couldn’t have hurt publicity; the WB had the uncensored episode up on its website the next day.

On “Teachers,” meanwhile, there’s nothing to be censored. It’s a throwback, actually, to the Hollywood notion that the best teachers are jaded and jokey or just plain mad, putting the “F” for fun back in school.

Adapted by Matt Tarses from a well-regarded British series, “Teachers” stars Justin Bartha as Jeff, whose jeans, loose ties and weary sarcasm are suggestive of life outside the school as a jazz bachelor, or maybe someone who can’t resist the next Phish tour.

Jeff might feel he has to hide the fact that he loves teaching, but he’s very sitcom alpha-male in the break room, which he navigates with more on-the-spot one-liners than Groucho Marx noodling Margaret Dumont in “Duck Soup.”

The exchanges here take place between Jeff and Alice (Sarah Alexander), a fellow teacher who is Jeff’s real crush even while his eyes and other body parts can’t help wandering over to Tina (“The L Word’s” Sarah Shahi), the spicy new substitute.

Nothing about the pilot of “Teachers” is particularly eye- or ear-opening (its supporting cast includes XTRA-AM (570)’s Phil Hendrie as a world-weary teacher). It merely exudes a sitcom’s forced but relatable charm. Just as Alice begins to melt to Jeff, the school hires Tina full-time. If you think he’s got problems, pity the poor 14-year-old in the back of Tina’s class.

*

‘The Bedford Diaries’

Where: WB

When: 9 to 10 p.m. Wednesday

Ratings: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)

*

‘Teachers’

Where: NBC

When: 9:30 to 10 tonight

Ratings: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)