Midway through the first episode of the new HBO sitcom Rooster, Steve Carell’s Greg Russo wonders exactly what he’s doing there. A bestselling author of pulpy crime novels, Greg has come to the campus of cozy Ludlow College to check in on his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), a young professor whose marriage is foundering because of her husband’s affair with a graduate student. But while he’s there for his kid, he finds himself being offered a job as the prestigious liberal arts school’s writer in residence, a kind of recognition he never thought he’d achieve, and one that makes him feel more uncomfortable than validated. “I write books that you’re supposed to read at the beach,” he tells the poetry teacher (Danielle Deadwyler) who’s showing him around campus. “They are light. They are fun. The characters that you like have sex; the ones you don’t get shot in the face.”
Bill Lawrence, who created Rooster with his longtime collaborator Matt Tarses, made the jump from network to streaming when Ted Lasso debuted on Apple TV in 2020. But it’s not hard to imagine that his first HBO series might have inspired thoughts similar to his new protagonist’s. What is the guy behind Scrubs and Cougar Town doing on the most prestigious of prestige networks, a place where even comedic half-hours tend to be tinged with melancholy and discomfort?
The answer, it turns out, is: making a Bill Lawrence show. Rooster makes some concessions to Lawrence’s new stomping grounds, namely its setting, which allows for gags about Zadie Smith and a seminar in “the poetry of Bad Bunny.” But the show seems less interested in Ivory Tower politics than Ted Lasso was in the nuances of the Premier League. Its idea of addressing contemporary culture is a running gag in which Greg keeps inadvertently offending the school’s hyperbolically thin-skinned students, such as when the woman he refers to as “my white whale” reports him for body-shaming.
It’s quickly apparent that Lawrence and Tarses aren’t trying to make a campus comedy like Lucky Hank or The Chair, or a show that feels as if it was made by anyone whose understanding of modern academia is informed by any research more detailed than dropping their kids off after summer break. The setting is just a pretext for getting Greg, who’s been fumbling through life since his high-powered wife (Connie Britton) divorced him five years ago, back in the game, and keeping him in close proximity to his adult daughter. The protagonist of Greg’s novels, Rooster, is confident, self-assured, and sexy, three qualities that Greg finds himself acutely lacking. But as one of his students reminds him, “This is college. You get to reinvent yourself here. Just decide whoever you want to be, and you be that shit.”
This isn’t the first time Carell has played a morose middle-aged man in search of his missing mojo—it’s one of his go-to modes, and he’s not being asked to stretch himself in any notable ways here. If there’s a new wrinkle, it’s that Greg doesn’t really need much in the way of adjustment. He’s already a bestselling writer, although he’s got a mild inferiority complex about not ranking higher in the literary establishment. (Lawrence and Tarses modeled that part of the character after the sunshine-noir novelist Carl Hiaasen, whose book Bad Monkey they adapted into an Apple TV series.) And Carell is, as one character acknowledges early on, a “silver fox.” He’s barely set foot on campus when Deadwyler’s poetry prof invites him up for a nightcap, and though he’s too caught off guard to take her up on the offer, he has no trouble finding other options.
Meanwhile, Greg’s daughter, Katie, is fitfully separated from her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), a preening aficionado of Russian literature whose first edition of War and Peace plays a key role in the plot. (In case Dunster’s posh accent throws you off, that’s Ted Lasso’s Jamie Tartt, playing a character with an equally lofty estimation of his own prowess, but far less reason to hold it.) He’s in love with his grad-student mistress (Lauren Tsai), even though she’s starting to pull away from him, and he and Katie keep falling back into old habits even though she’s furious with him. In other words, they’re a mess, making what could have been a clean break as ambiguous and complicated as it could possibly be.
Rooster doesn’t have villains, exactly, although the characters are constantly stepping on their own toes and are sometimes self-involved to the point of cruelty. While lying in bed next to a new conquest, Greg excitedly muses about what a relief it is to be having casual, no-strings-attached sex, oblivious to the fact that the fiftysomething single mom he’s just slept with clearly had designs on a real relationship. The students look to their elders for guidance, but the adults are just twentysomethings with bigger bank accounts and less resilient bodies, mucking their way through a life they feel sure they ought to understand better by now.
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Rooster can be unusually broad for an HBO show, happy to cut to wocka-wocka punchlines rather than go for wistful nod-laughs. But like The Pitt, it seems to fit into a push to make at least some of the network’s programming more like old-school TV, now that streaming has killed off much of what it was originally designed to supplement. There’s room here for a more pointed farce about an outdated patriarch forced to navigate the unfamiliar waters of midlife dating and Gen Z sensitivity, or for an understated dramedy about a father and daughter who reconnect in a period of mutual upheaval. But Rooster feels like it’s doing half of each and not enough of either. The comedic beats are strained, the sentiment mawkish (which, come to think of it, adds up to a fairly apt description of Ted Lasso’s less satisfying years). Deadwyler brings a tart knowingness to her scenes, but she’s underutilized, and her character doesn’t expand meaningfully in the half-season shown to critics in advance. Carell still has small-screen charisma to burn, and the show is charming in an insubstantial way. But it’s also forgettable, lacking both the hangout appeal of a classic sitcom and the richness that might sustain a yearslong storyline. Greg isn’t looking for a relationship, and Rooster isn’t, either. It’s here for a good time, not a long time.
