Gone are the days where versatile performers like Tom Hanks, Tim Robbins, or Robin Williams could easily flip between genres; any Hollywood veteran given the slightest hint of legitimacy is unlikely to give it up. In the case of Steve Carell, his dramatic breakthrough in the true crime sports drama Foxcatcher was casting that worked because the socially inept, creepy John du Pont was a twist of the qualities that made him so endearing in The Office. Unfortunately, it inspired a decade in which Carell was interested in anything that wasn’t Michael Scott; between an abusive television host in The Morning Show, a cheating husband in The Four Seasons, a lonely therapist in The Patient, and a stiff-lipped military leader in Space Force, Carell’s had a streak of being as unlikable as possible.
Carell denied himself the opportunity to excel at what he’s best at. However, any doubt that he’d forsaken his charismatic persona altogether are vanquished by Rooster, the new Sunday night dramedy from HBO. Rooster is the type of sitcom that could’ve aired a lifetime before Carell got his big break. He’s cast as Greg Russo, an author behind paperback “airplane novels” that center on the slick, womanizing adventure hero known as “Rooster.” Russo isn’t respected by the literary community, but he’s a celebrity who’s been given multiple offers to host speaking engagements. While his social anxieties have prevented him from accepting, Rooster attends a Q&A session at Ludlow College, a New England university where his daughter Katie (Charly Clive) is an art professor.
Russo’s relationship with Katie isn’t troubled as much as muted; she’s been only intermittently in touch after estranged from her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), a fellow professor who had an affair with a much younger graduate student. Given that Russo’s writing is aimed at a broad audience of nostalgic, casual readers, his presence isn’t received with much enthusiasm by the student population of a liberal arts school like Ludlow, with one student used the Q&A event to ask, “Why do you hate women?” However, Ludlow’s involvement in the school, which is soon transformed into a writing residency, is touted as a victory by the college’s president, Walter Mann (John C. McGinley).
Rooster is the latest series from Bill Lawrence, who’s quietly behind the second busiest showrunner in television (because no one works at the rate of Taylor Sheridan). In addition to the revival of his show Scrubs and the delayed fourth season of Ted Lasso, Lawrence has embarked on another season of Shrinking alongside a follow-up to his adaptation of Bad Monkey. Lawrence’s style of feel-good, low stakes dramedy hasn’t changed in 20 years, but it’s more respected. Friends, Parks and Recreation, and Lawrence’s own Scrubs don’t consistently top the Nielsen charts because they’re the funniest shows, but because they give audiences a sense of familiarity that’s not unlike hanging out with friends.
Rooster isn’t as star-studded as Lawerence’s other recent efforts; Carell’s the only A-lister on the show, even if McGinley has been an underappreciated character actor for decades, whose credits include collaborations with Oliver Stone, Kathryn Bigelow, and David Fincher. What’s distinctive about the show is that it’s from HBO, a network that has typically avoided this style of laid-back, playful sitcoms in favor of weirder efforts like The Rehearsal and The Chair Company. There’s nothing particularly side-splitting about Rooster, even if it does raise a few notable points about the economics behind higher education. The frank comments about the bleak prospects for post-graduates to earn real jobs are made by Dylan Shepard, the campus coordinator played by Danielle Deadwyler.
The greatest virtue and drawback to Lawrence’s body of work is his lack of a critical eye. Scrubs was never going to be a serious condemnation of the healthcare system because Lawrence is too in love with his doctors; similarly, Ted Lasso only playfully satirized the culture of English soccer without any condemnation of the institution. What’s of more importance to Lawrence is the relationships, and Rooster has enough compelling dynamics to sustain a season’s worth of light-hearted ribbing; Archie’s a more complex character than Dunster’s foul-mouthed Jamie Tartt in Ted Lasso, which is only a bigger impediment to Russo because he thinks his daughter should leave him behind. Since Lawrence is unlikely to conceive of any broad villains, Archie’s graduate love interest Sunny (Lauren Tsai) is sympathetic, which is all the more frustrating for Katie.
That Rooster will be received as anything but a functional, if unextraordinary way to spend a half-hour every Sunday is a result of the ongoing acquisition of Warner Bros. by David Ellison. There’s been indications already that the new conglomerate would merge the failing Paramount Plus streaming service with HBO Max, which would be a disastrous decision given how poorly received the initial combination of HBO and Discovery programming was. If Paramount has a sway on HBO’s programming, it’s less likely that there would be a greenlight for the next Industry or The Rehearsal. Rooster might be more likely to survive the merger, but that doesn’t mean it should be villainized.