Despite a tremendous cast and ample, if sporadically utilized, charm, HBO‘s Rooster suffers from a surfeit of loglines and an insufficiency of focus in deciding which one it wants to follow. It’s a show with an excess of underdeveloped identities, rather than a lack of identity, spackling over its poorly fused story elements with a sense of humor that’s sometimes appealing and frequently desperately hacky.
Rooster is the story of an introverted pulp fiction author (Steve Carell), who is nothing like his macho alter ego but gets the opportunity to change his life when he gets a job as writer-in-residence at a small New England college.
The Bottom Line Still trying — too hard — to find itself.
Airdate: 10 p.m. Sunday, March 8 (HBO)Cast: Steve Carell, Charly Clive, Phil Dunster, Danielle Deadwyler, Lauren Tsai and John C. McGinleyCreators: Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses
Rooster is the story of a successful novelist (Steve Carell) who never went to college, but gets the chance to recreate the coed experience when he gets a job as writer-in-residence at a small New England college.
Rooster is about a bestselling novelist (Steve Carell) who gets a job as writer-in-residence at a small New England college, reuniting him with his daughter (Charly Clive), an art history professor dealing with a crumbling marriage.
Steve Carell stars in Rooster as a former [narrative element redacted] who gets a job as writer-in-residence at a small New England college, only to find his true purpose when he somewhat confusingly becomes the school’s new [narrative element redacted].
A poetry teacher (Danielle Deadwyler) at a small New England college is looking forward to a reunion with her best friend, newly hired as writer-in-residence, only to have the school’s president (John C. McGinley) give the job to a schlocky potboiler scribe (Steve Carell) who doesn’t even want the job. They — the poet and the novelist — nearly hook up. Complications ensue.
OK, to be clear, Rooster absolutely isn’t the last show I mentioned, though that’s certainly a subplot — “Mediocre, entirely unqualified and generally uninterested white man snakes a job from Black poet’s friend” — that’s a part of Rooster, one the show really isn’t equipped to handle.
I wish it were! Television needs to stop treating Deadwyler like a condiment when she’s the full buffet. Rooster was created by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, and I get why they were interested in the side-story about Deadwyler’s Dylan but not interested enough for it to be the main show — especially not with the presence of Steve Carell as the centerpiece for the rest of it. But a big part of me watched the six episodes sent to critics and wished Lawrence and Tarses had brought in Ashley Nicole Black to shepherd and run the series. Black has worked with Lawrence on Shrinking and Ted Lasso, so she understands his brand of broad humor and sentiment. She also has extensive experience as a graduate student, so she knows the world of academia in a way it’s fairly evident Lawrence and Tarses do not.
Oh well. Deadwyler was just cast as a lead in Ryan Coogler’s update of The X-Files, so at least somebody understands that she should be The Show, not somebody you include in a supporting capacity to make the show better.
It isn’t like the loglines I went through for Rooster are that different from each other, but they require different levels of plotting, when it’s a truth near-universally acknowledged that Bill Lawrence shows generally work best when they dispatch with, or at least de-emphasize, their gimmicks — “40something woman wants to date younger men” or “Grief-stricken shrink does wildly unethical things” — and just become stories about damaged people hanging out, making mistakes and hugging.
It’s completely possible that by the end of the 10-episode first season, Rooster will have found its story, resolved its most discordant pieces and become another of those charming-and-more Bill Lawrence shows. What’s irritating about Rooster as of now is that there’s little evidence which version of Greg Russo’s (that’s the name of Carell’s character, while “Rooster” is the name of his alter ego) story is the one they needed to tell, and there’s no evidence at all of what drew them to the university setting.
For years, nobody would have cared about specifics or depth of research in depictions of this field, what with “college professor” spending decades as an occupation that television writers found less intriguing than “meth dealer,” “guy who lives in post-apocalyptic bunker” and “John Wayne Gacy.” Recently, however, there has been a renaissance of characters who could explain what the Renaissance was; between The Chair, Lucky Hank and Vladimir, which Netflix is launching this weekend against Rooster, “college professor” has become nearly as popular a fictional job as “guy who lives in post-apocalyptic bunker.” So you have to at least pretend you know what colleges are like in 2026.
Everything in Rooster is academically amorphous, from the type of school Ludlow College is to the type of students who go there to the issues that are most important to them. While the series contains only a small amount of humor directed at how “woke” today’s youth are, it leans impossibly heavily into humor about how things that were appropriate a decade ago can now get you in lots of trouble — an element that Vladimir, a show I didn’t even enjoy, understands on a far less superficial level.
Rooster just can’t get past being endlessly amused that no matter how well-intentioned Greg is, he’s constantly getting sent to the disciplinary board for perfectly reasonable things like accidentally groping a student, accidentally body shaming a student, and other bits of accidental archaic behavior. Carell is so good at playing the withdrawn and unassuming side of Greg’s personality that it’s disappointing every time the series tires of his somewhat against-type meekness and turns him into a bumbling sitcom lead — with intentional or unintentional nods to The Office, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and other Carell comic hits, rather than pushing him to Little Miss Sunshine-level depressive depths.
Carell has good chemistry with all of his costars, including McGinley in one of his trademark gruff-but-lovable roles; Deadwyler, great every time Rooster remembers she exists; and Clive, whose Katie is struggling to find her identity after her Russian studies prof hubby (Phil Dunster’s Archie) cheats on her with a grad student — not his grad student, the show emphasizes, though it would be pointless to explain what sort of grad student she is — named Sunny (Lauren Tsai).
Like Carell, Clive — so good in the British series Pure — is better the less the script asks her to overtly play comedy, and she’s constantly doing embarrassing or even illegal things just to produce equity with Archie, whom the show unsuccessfully tries to treat as an endearing man-child instead of a philandering cad. You can sense Lawrence remembering how Dunster miraculously brought sympathetic shadings to Jamie Tartt in Ted Lasso and hoping he can do the same here. So far, it isn’t working, though Tsai is able to make her Other Woman character into something more. Plus Sunny has a roommate played by Robby Hoffman, and all things are better with a dose of Robby Hoffman — even things that don’t quite know what to do with Robby Hoffman.
The ensemble is full of comparably under-utilized performers, stars as big as Connie Britton, appearing in one episode as the wealthy wife who broke Greg’s heart; Alan Ruck, as a college administrator treated as a boorish dinosaur so that McGinley’s Walt looks like less of a dinosaur; Scott MacArthur, as an out-of-control hockey coach; and Annie Mumolo, as an assistant who takes an interest in Greg. Among the actors who aren’t instantly recognizable, Maximo Salas steals a number of scenes as a bumbling student whom Greg takes under his wing.
Rooster has such a good cast that I was frequently able to forget how flailing the show’s more overt attempts at humor can be — as well as all the ways it’s being creepy or just weird without quite achieving the level of heart necessary to earn those extended scenes in Walt’s front-porch sauna or Greg’s inappropriate gaffes. Lawrence’s pedigree makes me confident that if Rooster can ever figure out which of several high-concept shows it wants to be and then leaves behind that high concept to just let the ensemble cook, it will work fine. But through six episodes, I was always conscious of how much of its potential is still buried.
