In “Rooster,” a brilliant comedy premiering Sunday on HBO, Steve Carell, comfortable as an uncomfortable person, plays Greg Russo, the author of a best-selling book series whose hero is named Rooster. She's come to leafy, fictional Ludlow College to give a reading, but also because it's where her daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), teaches art history, and because word throughout the school is that her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), a history professor, left her for Sunny (Lauren Tsai), a neuroscience graduate student. He is a worried father.
“They're light; they're fun. The characters you like have sex, the ones you don't get shot in the face,” Greg tells poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) about the “beach reading” books he writes, as she accompanies him to an auditorium. Unlike his fictional alter ego, Greg is, by his own account, a self-aware introvert, enhanced by the fact that his ex-wife, Elizabeth (Connie Britton), “a philanthropist, pioneer in corporate gender equality, and successful CEO” whose name adorns the school's new student center, left him five years earlier and he never moved on. Plus, Greg likes nuts and cocoa, can throw a penny in a jar from across the room, and played little league hockey, which will put him back on skates here.
College president Walter Mann (John C. McGinley) decides it would be “a feather in his cap” to hire a reluctant Greg, “a best-selling author the parents have actually heard of,” as a resident artist, a deal he makes impossible to refuse by agreeing to keep Katie on staff after she accidentally burns down Archie's house. (She was just trying to burn her first edition of “War and Peace”). It's a role quite similar to the one McGinley played/plays in “Scrubs,” but more political and better dressed, when he's dressed: he meets in his backyard sauna.
And they leave.
Poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) and author Greg (Steve Carell) become colleagues when Greg is named artist-in-residence.
(Katrina Marcinowski/HBO)
The series was created by Bill Lawrence (“Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking,” “Scrubs,” “Bad Monkey”) and his frequent collaborator Matt Tarses, and like men of at least a certain age, the vision leans from experience toward innocence; Students play a secondary, though not insignificant, role in the story. There are some pro forma jokes about young people's sensibilities, with Greg getting into not-so-hot trouble for misunderstood references to “White Whale” and the Bangles' “Walk Like an Egypt.” (“Liberal arts college used to be a haven for free thought, Greg,” Walt says. “When did you and I become the bad guys?”) It's not that the older guys are reliably smart about life (the ways they don't drive the series), but they have a better sense of where they're stupid.
“No one should be humiliated,” Greg tells Archie, quoting Chekhov, as Archie leaves to talk to Katie. (The quote is also in the animated opening titles, so you can take it as important.) But no one here is out to humiliate anyone, which is nasty and cruel and not at all the kind of humor Lawrence trades in. Of course, the characters will be put in embarrassing positions, or they will embarrass themselves, shame being the root of all comedy, or almost so. (There's a bit of slapstick woven in.) And though we're told “there are real villains lurking in this place,” kindness reigns, at least throughout the six episodes, of 10, available for review, with the possible exception of Alan Ruck as Dean of English. (“There's no way she wrote all these poems,” he says of Emily Dickinson.)
Although there are couples, ex-partners, and new couples, one does not necessarily feel interested in them getting together, staying together, or getting back together. In fact, as in other Lawrence projects, which typically feature divorced or separated characters, the romance is a sort of garnish, not so much the issue as whether people manage to treat each other well. We knew Ted Lasso wasn't going to get his wife back, but that wasn't the point (or winning games, for that matter); kindness was what mattered. Greg's possibly pre-romantic friendship with Dylan is no more significant than his intergenerational friendship with a group of dim-witted students (led by Máximo Solas as Tommy); They treat each other as peers, knowing that they are not. He teaches them that peanut butter can make celery better and they teach him that it's cooler than he thinks.
Katie, who says she still loves Archie, who says he still loves her, will also call him “a regular narcissist who sometimes smells like wildflowers.” (As for the matter-of-fact, deadpan Sunny, no one understanding her jokes is a running joke; not even Archie can see what she sees in him, a problem you might have too, but, as with most of us here, we shouldn't just write him off.) The fun supporting characters, who get some of the best business, notably include Rory Scovel as a cop who can't follow his gun, Robby Hoffman as Sunny's intense, anti-Archie roommate, and Annie Mumolo (co-writer of “Bridesmaids”) as Walt's top assistant.
Old but not too old-fashioned, “Rooster” has a tinge of Generation X nostalgia, underscored by '80s college radio classics that line the soundtrack. (REM's Michael Stipe co-wrote and sings the show's theme, and Greg, drunk and cranky, will ruin a party by having the DJ play “Everybody Hurts.” Directed by Jonathan Krisel (“Portlandia,” “Baskets”), it's low-stakes, soft-edged, human, basically kind, a little fantastical, a little ridiculous, well-acted and well-acted in every case—qualities I like, and maybe you will, too.
