![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1772991128_231_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nIn \u201cRooster,\u201d a genial comedy premiering Sunday on HBO, Steve Carell, comfortable as an uncomfortable person, plays Greg Russo, the author of a best-selling series of books whose hero is named Rooster. He has come to leafy, fictional Ludlow College to give a reading, but also because it\u2019s where his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive) teaches art history, and because it\u2019s all over school that her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), a history professor, has left her for Sunny (Lauren Tsai), a graduate student in neuroscience. He\u2019s a concerned father.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are light; they are fun. The characters that you like have sex, the ones you don\u2019t get shot in the face,\u201d Greg tells poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) of the \u201cbeach read\u201d books he writes, as she ushers him to an auditorium. Unlike his fictional alter ego, Greg is by his own account a self-conscious introvert, heightened by the fact that his ex-wife, Elizabeth (Connie Britton) \u2014 \u201ca philanthropist, a pioneer in corporate gender equality and an accomplished CEO\u201d whose name adorns the school\u2019s new student center \u2014 left him five years earlier and he never moved on. Additionally, Greg likes nuts and cocoa, can toss a penny into a jar from across a room, and played minor league hockey, which will put him back on skates here.<\/p>\n
College president Walter Mann (John C. McGinley) decides it would be \u201ca feather in his cap\u201d to hire a reluctant Greg, \u201ca best-selling author that the parents have actually heard of,\u201d as an artist-in-residence \u2014 a deal he makes impossible to refuse by agreeing to keep Katie on staff after she accidentally burns down Archie\u2019s house. (She was only trying to burn his first edition of \u201cWar & Peace.\u201d) It\u2019s a role quite like the one McGinley played\/plays on \u201cScrubs,\u201d but more politic and better dressed, when dressed \u2014 he takes meetings in his backyard sauna.<\/p>\n
And they\u2019re off.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) and author Greg (Steve Carell) become colleagues when Greg is named artist-in-residence.<\/p>\n
(Katrina Marcinowski \/ HBO)<\/p>\n
The series was created by Bill Lawrence<\/a> (\u201cTed Lasso,\u201d<\/a> \u201cShrinking,\u201d<\/a> \u201cScrubs,\u201d<\/a> \u201cBad Monkey\u201d<\/a>) and frequent collaborator Matt Tarses, and as men of at least a certain age, the view is slanted from experience back toward innocence; students play a secondary, though not insignificant role in the story. There are some pro forma jokes about the sensitivities of the young, with Greg getting into not-very-hot water over misunderstood references to \u201cwhite whale\u201d and the Bangles\u2019 \u201cWalk Like an Egyptian.\u201d (\u201cLiberal arts college used to be havens for free thought, Greg,\u201d says Walt. \u201cWhen did you and I become the bad guys?\u201d) Not that the olds are reliably smart about life \u2014 the ways in which they\u2019re not power the series \u2014 but they have a better notion of where they\u2019re stupid.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one must be humiliated,\u201d Greg says to Archie, quoting Chekhov, as Archie goes off to talk to Katie. (The quote is in the animated opening titles as well, so you can take it as important.) But no one here is out to humiliate anyone, which is nasty and unkind and not at all the sort of humor Lawrence trades in. Of course, characters will be put into embarrassing positions, or embarrass themselves, embarrassment being the root of all comedy, or near enough. (There\u2019s a good bit of slapstick knitted in.) And though we\u2019re told that \u201cthere are real villains lurking around this place,\u201d niceness reigns \u2014 at least through the six episodes, of 10, available to review \u2014 with the possible exception of Alan Ruck as the dean of English. (\u201cThere\u2019s no way she wrote all these poems,\u201d he says of Emily Dickinson.)<\/p>\n Though there are couples, and ex-couples and new couples, one doesn\u2019t necessarily feel invested in their getting together, or staying together, or getting back together. Indeed, as in other Lawrence projects \u2014 which typically feature divorced or separated characters \u2014 romance is a sort of side dish, less the issue than whether people are managing to treat one another well. We knew Ted Lasso wasn\u2019t going to get his wife back, but it wasn\u2019t the point (nor was winning games, really); kindness was what mattered. Greg\u2019s possibly pre-romantic friendship with Dylan is no more significant than his cross-generational friendship with a group of goofball students (led by Maximo Solas as Tommy); they treat each other as peers, while knowing they aren\u2019t. He teaches them that peanut butter can make celery better, and they teach him that he\u2019s cooler than he thinks.<\/p>\n Katie, who says she still loves Archie \u2014 who says he still loves her \u2014 will also call him \u201ca run-of-the-mill narcissistic a\u2014 who sometimes smells like wildflowers.\u201d (As for Sunny, practical and deadpan \u2014 that no one gets her jokes is a running joke \u2014 not even Archie can see what she sees in him, a problem you might have as well, but, as is true of most everyone here, we\u2019re not meant to merely write him off. Funny secondary characters, who get some of the best business, notably include Rory Scovel<\/a> as a cop who can\u2019t keep track of his gun, Robby Hoffman<\/a> as Sunny\u2019s intense, anti-Archie roommate and Annie Mumolo<\/a> (co-writer of \u201cBridesmaids\u201d) as Walt\u2019s arch assistant.<\/p>\n Old-but-not-that-old-fashioned, \u201cRooster\u201d has a tinge of Gen X nostalgia, underscored by the \u201980s college radio classics that line the soundtrack. (R.E.M.\u2019s Michael Stipe co-wrote and sings the series\u2019 theme, and Greg, drunk and in a mood, will kill a party getting the DJ to play \u201cEverybody Hurts.\u201d Directed by Jonathan Krisel (\u201cPortlandia,\u201d \u201cBaskets\u201d), it\u2019s low stakes, soft-edged, humane, basically gentle, a little fantastic, a little farcical, well cast and well played in every instance \u2014 qualities I happen to like, and maybe you do, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201cRooster,\u201d a genial comedy premiering Sunday on HBO, Steve Carell, comfortable as an uncomfortable person, plays Greg…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[162267,5800,162268,422,6935,146,162269,162266,85,46,49238,37092,157178,8075,162270,139777,4313,411,21177],"class_list":{"0":"post-328607","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-archie","9":"tag-author","10":"tag-best-selling-series","11":"tag-book","12":"tag-character","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-genial-comedy","15":"tag-greg-russo","16":"tag-il","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-katie","19":"tag-one","20":"tag-rooster","21":"tag-school","22":"tag-scrub","23":"tag-steve-carell","24":"tag-student","25":"tag-tv","26":"tag-walt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}