Rooster, the new HBO series created by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, and starring Steve Carrell is – if you’ll forgive me mixing my birds – a bit of an odd duck. Featuring Carrell as a best-selling author feeling lost in life who gets his mojo back thanks to a stint teaching at the liberal arts college where his daughter also works, it’s vintage Lawrence. And naturally, it’s a pleasure to see Carrell back in sticking-foot-in-mouth goofball mode. But as an HBO Sunday night comedy, it doesn’t quite fit.
Not to dive too deep into the history of HBO comedies, but they run the gamut from transgressive fare like The Chair Company to broader plays like Ballers and Entourage. But rarely has the channel aired a merely pleasant half-hour like Rooster, which is often so light it could potentially float away, not unlike a bird that is not a rooster because they can only hover in short bursts.
Bird facts aside, on, the surface – and also in practice – Rooster is Lawrence’s formula, perfected. Like with the pioneering sitcom Scrubs, which Lawrence created and Tarses worked on as a writer and co-executive producer, Rooster is mostly about good people trying to be better while dealing with the byzantine rules of the working/living situation they’re all stuck in. The laughs aren’t usually of the belly variety, everyone is extremely intelligent (unless they’re a funny dummy), and John C. McGinley is in charge – the Scrubs stalwart returns here as the more gossip–and-sauna-focused and less caustic Dean of the fictional Ludlow College.
Beyond Scrubs, though, Lawrence has been on a tear the past few years since Ted Lasso on Apple TV, following that up with Shrinking and now Rooster, all of which feature known, white male comedians being sad about their wives, obtaining new (or reinvigorated) jobs, and getting all up in their co-workers personal lives while they heal. The shows also all feature the same sort of folk-rock theme songs over the credits, which you would swear are from the same band, except they’re not. (Note: Apple’s Bad Monkey also slots in here nicely, except it’s technically an hour-long comedic drama instead of a half-hour comedy and Vince Vaughan’s character isn’t sad about his wife, as far as I’m aware.)
Look, when it works, it works, and Ted Lasso (at least for the first two seasons) really worked. Shrinking, without spoiling anything about the upcoming Season 3 finale on Apple TV, sticks the landing on a three-season arc. And Rooster, based on the first six episodes of the season provided to critics?
…That’s more of a TBD, as the series takes at least three episodes to establish its premise, that Carrell’s Greg Russo is teaching at the university. It’s a wildly long period of time – particularly as this show is releasing weekly, and not as the binge I experienced it as for this review – given the history of TV would dictate that it would get set up at the end of a pilot. Instead, while I guess this is a spoiler, we’re not fully established until a full third of the season is done. And once the show does settle itself at school, it becomes a run-of-the-mill workplace sitcom.
To bring it back to HBO of it all, while it doesn’t matter all that much in the scheme of things (Rooster will eventually play on HBO Max, and then maybe Paramount+, and wherever else corporate consolidation takes the series), it is curious to see something so pleasantly inoffensive on HBO’s Sunday night schedule, instead of on, say, ABC with the Scrubs revival, or even next to Shrinking and Ted Lasso on Apple TV, home of star-driven fare like this series. HBO comedies haven’t all been slam-dunks across the channel’s long history, but rarely have they been so passive as Rooster.
That also isn’t to say that the series doesn’t have its pleasures. As mentioned above, it’s a relief to see Carrell back in the goofball mode he perfected on The Office, after wasting his talents on unfunny fluff like The Four Seasons or outright disasters like Space Force. He’s not quite Michael Scott, but watching him blunder his way through various interactions or prat-falling down a slippery hill, you’ll see why Carrell was vaunted to the height of comedy stars.
The rest of the cast is uniformly good, as well. Phil Dunster moves from Ted Lasso to this series as a professor, Archie, not stretching himself too much as a self-involved Englishman, though his clueless handsomeness continues to be charming even if he lacks Jamie Tartt’s hard edge. Charly Clive is essentially the second lead of the show as Carrell’s daughter Katie, also a professor, who was cheated on by Archie and is dealing with the fallout… She plays best when the show allows her to be an absolute mess, which is very, very often. But the real breakout is Danielle Deadwyler as Dylan, a professor at the college who strikes up a will-they, won’t-they with Carrell. While that provides a nice spine for any TV series (again, Lawrence knows what he’s doing here), Deadwyler manages to find a hilarious, deadpan nuance in every single line. Everyone else is showing up for class, but in each episode Deadwyler is teaching the rest of the cast how it’s done.
Not to run down every single actor, but Lauren Tsai is also good as Sunny, belatedly picking up off her breakout turn years back in Season 3 of FX’s Legion as the post-grad student Archie cheated on Katie with. John C. McGinley is always funny, though you may see a lot more of his naked body than you might expect and/or like. And again, not to harp on Lawrence knowing what he’s doing, but a comedy like this wouldn’t work if the supporting cast didn’t populate the world… And thankfully, this world is populated with hilarious weirdos like Annie Mumolo’s over-sexed Dean’s assistant Cristle, Robby Hoffman as Tsai’s take-no-s**t roommate, Scott MacArthur as an extremely drunk coach of the school’s hockey team, and the best of the bunch, Rory Scovell as the town’s cop, who hates Greg and also keeps forgetting where he left his gun.
Helping keep things rolling is the establishment of some pretty funny running bits, like the aforementioned gun one, a local store that sells ridiculous looking hot cocoa with a peppermint stick straw, and an accident that finds most of the school calling Greg, “Grg.” Even when there’s a bit that doesn’t quite stick the landing, there are so many jokes per minute, one is bound to hit, sooner or later.
Another (chicken) feather in Rooster’s cap? It avoids the normal pitfalls of current, college-set series. Yes, it deals with changing mores of generations and cancel culture, but unlike other shows of its type (I’m looking at Netflix’s The Chair or the just-debuted Vladimir, or AMC’s Lucky Hank), it manages to deal with an older white guy making constant, accidental, insulting gaffes with a light touch that leans into the humor without being preachy or dismissive. It’s also difficult to make a college comedy work, as the stakes usually are set a lot lower than focusing on the big emotions of high school, or to reference Lawrence’s other shows, sports and/or mental health. But Rooster channels the setting to allow the characters thrive, though there is a fair amount about the tricky nature of running a college itself. The college setting works because it’s a setting; not the main event.
The problem is that Rooster isn’t treading any new ground. It lacks the triumphant sports movie structure of Ted Lasso, or the pressing nature of overcoming grief that gives Shrinking its drive. The HBO series has the same hangout quality of the previous two mentioned, but even six episodes in, it’s not entirely clear what Greg wants or needs other than to be slightly less sad. It’s part of the point, as the show keeps hammering, that college is where you figure yourself out. Can Greg, pushing 60, do the same? But perhaps that’s something Lawrence and company should have figured out before they made this series. Greg might be lost, but having found itself on HBO Sunday nights instead of ABC right after Scrubs, it seems like Rooster might have lost its way, as well. And that’s not a lot to crow about.
Rooster premieres Sunday, March 8 at 10:00p.m. ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max.
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