Bill Lawrence has a knack for establishing the relationships between the characters of his shows early on, so that he and his collaborators have the wiggle room to mix and match them in different situations. The formula is pretty familiar, but it seems to work every time because of the shows’ stellar casts. That’s what we see with the new HBO comedy Rooster.
ROOSTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A car drives through an autumn scene, and pulls up on the campus of Ludlow College. Author Greg Russo (Steve Carell) is in the passenger seat.
The Gist: Greg, the author of the popular Rooster series of books, is there to be a guest lecturer for a class taught by Professor Dylan Shepherd (Danielle Deadwyler). He’s nervous but Dylan tries to ease his anxiety; after he reads a passage, a student grills him on how he depicts women in his novels, while another likes how a female character used a bra as a tourniquet.
Dylan introduces Greg to the college’s president, Walter Mann (John C. McGinley), who appreciates that Greg was able to handle the misogyny question head on; “life is hard, and we’re not teaching these kids squat,” Walter says about how they’re too easy on today’s students.
Walter, as he gets changed to go to the gym, offers Greg an author-in-residence gig, which Greg turns down. After all, the real reason he’s at Ludlow is to see his daughter Katie (Charly Clive), who teaches at the school; she’s been reeling since her husband Archie (Phil Dunster), another professor there, left her for a grad student named Sunny (Lauren Tsai). She’s embarrassed and hates that everyone on campus knows; she proves it by asking a random student passing by, who tries to feign ignorance but can’t.
Katie has no idea why Archie left her for Sunny, because there didn’t seem to be an indication that there was trouble. Now she’s moved into the dead hockey coach’s house and is a bit lost.
That night, Dylan runs into Greg at the bar of the inn where he’s staying and they hit it off; she proposes he spend the night and he awkwardly turns her down, as much as he wanted to actually sleep with her. Before that, though, she encourages him to go talk to Archie.
When he does that the next day, Archie tells Greg that he loves Katie and thinks he messed up, which leads Greg to convince Katie to talk directly to her estranged husband, and to “be kind.” But by the time Katie does that, Archie ends up getting news that changes things.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Rooster, created by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, hews fairly close to the Lawrence “hangout show” formula, most recently displayed on Shrinking. It’s also interesting that this show centers around a campus sex scandal, and it debuts the same week as Vladimir, which centers around a similar event.
Our Take: The second episode of Rooster is probably more indicative of what the series will be like than the first. That’s because the second episode has almost as many scenes that establish the other relationships on the show than they have of Carrel’s character Greg interacting with Katie, Dylan, Walt, Archie or anyone else.
That has been the secret sauce of Lawrence’s comedies going back to at least Cougar Town, or maybe even the OG Scrubs. Lawrence and Tarses, who is a veteran of Lawrence shows, know that the sooner they start having scenes without the show’s central character, the more dynamic their series will end up being, even if it takes a while for the show its full comedic potential.
So in the second episode, we see more of Dylan and Walt’s friendship, where Walt has to give her bad news about the school’s literary journal. We see more interaction between Archie and Sunny, and see that Sunny isn’t some naïf under the spell of the older, handsome Brit. We even see Walt melt his brown fat in his sauna/cold plunge cycle with the local cop (Rory Scovel) who was looking into an incident involving Katie that we won’t spoil.
While the first episode isn’t packed with laughs, it still does a good job of establishing Greg’s complicated relationship with Katie, and how awkward he continues to be even in his “silver fox” years; a conversation he has with Dylan about how, when he was married to Katie’s mom, their friends all secretly thought he had married out of his league is an indication of this. Carell, of course, is an expert at playing awkward, but when there are dramatic moments, the small gestures he makes to show Greg’s introspection or self-awareness have a lot of impact.
As usual, the cast is packed with Lawrence alumni — McGinley, Scovel and Dunster in the first episode, and we’ll see Alan Ruck and Connie Britton in later episodes — who are adept with the rhythms of the producer’s shows. But Carell, Deadwyler, Tsai and Clive fit in well, bringing their own rhythms into the mix.
Performance Worth Watching: We already praised Carell, but we also loved how Deadwyler plays the strong but lonely Dylan, who opens up to Greg about working and living in a place where there is a decided lack of people who can relate to her.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After Katie hears Archie’s news, she does something that she thinks will be a good way to vent about it, but it leads to disaster.
Sleeper Star: We could watch John C. McGinley ordering off a menu. Yes, most of his characters are generally arrogant types, but they all have more depth to them then they seem to have at first, and we love hearing him monologue about things like the rules plaque Walt made for the sauna or the whole brown fat thing.
Most Pilot-y Line: After Greg reluctantly turns Dylan down not once but twice, Dylan tries to unlock her door with her bent key. To get the awkwardness over with, she actually throws a rock through a window in the door in order to open it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Rooster manages to start building the world that Steve Carell’s character enters into pretty early on, giving viewers a chance to get to know the ensemble as Greg and Katie redefine their father-daughter relationship.
How To Watch Rooster
If you’re new to HBO Max, you can sign up for as low as $10.99/month with ads, but an ad-free subscription will cost $18.49/month.
If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the discounted Disney+ Bundles with Hulu and HBO Max. With ads, the bundle costs $19.99/month and without ads, $32.99/month.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.