Bill Lawrence’s new college-set comedy “Rooster” may boast an impressive ensemble — including Steve Carell and a pair of familiar faces from the producer’s past hits in Phil Dunster (“Ted Lasso”) and John C. McGinley (“Scrubs”) — but at its core, the series is about loneliness.
That theme surfaces early in Sunday’s premiere, when Carell’s Greg admits to Professor Dylan Shepherd (Danielle Deadwyler) that even during his 25-year marriage, he often felt alone.
“What I love about the shows that Bill does is that you’ll have that thing thematically — like those elements to a scene or to a storyline — and then you twist it and there’s something funny either within it, at the end of it, or it’s sort of bookended with something funny,” Carell tells TVLine. “There’s always a way in and out, which is like life, which is what I love.”
Carell plays Greg Russo, an accomplished author known for a collection of “beach reads” where “characters you like have sex, and the ones you don’t get shot in the face.” He arrives at Ludlow College for a speaking engagement — and to check in on his daughter, art history professor Katie (Charly Clive), who has recently separated from her two-timing husband, fellow Ludlow professor Archie (played by Dunster). Complicating matters further, Archie has impregnated grad student Sunny (Lauren Tsai).
Greg’s arrival on campus ultimately forces him to confront a deeper question about his own life. Five years earlier, he was cheated on by Katie’s mother Elizabeth (played in a later episode by Connie Britton), and he’s struggled to pick up the pieces ever since. Ludlow president Walter Mann (McGinley) wants Greg to uproot his life and take a position as the college’s writer-in-residence, but Greg isn’t sure whether it’s possible to start over.
Reinvention… or Escapism?
As revealed in a trailer for the series, Greg’s stay at Ludlow soon takes an unexpected turn. In future episodes, when undergrads begin referring to him as “Rooster” — the carefree, gun-toting, womanizing hero of his novels — Greg starts leaning into certain aspects of the persona. At one point, he even admits that the titular Rooster is the version of himself he wishes he were, raising an obvious question: Is this a story about reinvention… or escapism?
“I don’t think it was meant to be escapism,” co-creator Matt Tarses tells TVLine. “More about reinvention — about a guy whose life hasn’t gone exactly how he wanted it to go, and whether there’s a way at this point, in his fifties, to recalibrate that.”
Lawrence adds that placing Greg on a college campus was a deliberate way to explore that idea.
“To see kids going through that experience simultaneously while a guy in his late fifties was going through that at the same time was kind of a cool way for us to explore what it means to be a man of this age,” he says.
For Carell, Greg’s fascination with Rooster ultimately reflects a complicated mix of aspiration and self-protection.
“I think it could be a little bit of both,” the actor says of Greg’s relationship with his alter ego. “He knows intellectually that that’s not going to happen — that he is not that person. He is not going to become that person. He’s not a superhero. He’s just not built that way.
“There is an element of pretend there too,” Carell adds. “He sort of wants to crawl inside and say that that’s who he wants to be as protection from who he actually is.”
We’ll see how that all works out in subsequent episodes. But for now, we want to know what you thought of HBO’s latest offering. Grade the first episode of “Rooster” via the following poll, then leave a comment with your full review.