Rooster is designed to be The Steve Carell Show. It hinges on the actor\u2019s charm, which he delivers plenty of, but Greg\u2019s not the only compelling Russo in this New England town. Katie\u2019s portrayer, Charly Clive, has slowly emerged as the secret weapon. So it\u2019s nice that season one\u2019s penultimate episode gives the actor more room to dig into different aspects of Katie as she deals with an existential crisis. Her storyline here helps Rooster tighten its pacing, which has been all over the place when you think about how it\u2019s already been an entire semester since Greg became Ludlow\u2019s writer-in-residence. The HBO series suffers from the streaming curse. That is, it\u2019s not a 22-episode sitcom that delivers delightful filler episodes that provide necessary context for who these characters are.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With only 10 half-hour installments, Rooster tries to be both a cozy comfort comedy and an infrequently emotional drama about the challenges of starting over. Throw in the wacky situational humor, like Archie\u2019s horny students or everything to do with Cristle, and the show comes across as scattered. Episode nine continues to mix these ingredients into an uneven smoothie, but Katie ends up as the saving grace. That\u2019s because Rooster allows her to finally, briefly, reflect on her life beyond Archie. Who is she as a person, and what does she want out of her career? Her romantic life might be stalled now that Archie has chosen to stay with Sunny, but her professional ambitions don\u2019t have to be. It sends Katie, who finds out she\u2019s ranked as \u201cLudlow\u2019s Fourth Hottest Professor,\u201d down a complicated path with her parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Everything looks fine when the episode picks up. She\u2019s trying to get past her heartbreak with support from Greg and Elizabeth (returning guest star Connie Britton), who is in Boston for a work meeting. She also decides to apply for a fast track toward tenure, with support from Dylan, who tells Katie to pursue this even if it could take up to five years for her to get it. Lunch with her mom goes well, too, because Elizabeth encourages Katie\u2019s dreams. It isn\u2019t until later, when Walt approves of her tenure and claims it\u2019ll be done in a year, that alarm bells go off for Katie. Why would Ludlow make an exception for her, considering she burned down faculty housing not too long ago and was almost fired?\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when it hits her that an influential Elizabeth, who donated a ton of money to the college and has a student center named after her, likely strong-armed Walt into it. And to her credit, her mom doesn\u2019t deny it at all. In fact, she refuses to apologize for helping her daughter out. Things get worse when Elizabeth accidentally reveals that she is also the reason Katie was hired in the first place. How else would an inexperienced 29-year-old get a full professorship at a liberal arts institute? Elizabeth is right in assuming that, but she doesn\u2019t exactly say it in a comforting way. She also can\u2019t grasp why Katie, who has just found out that she didn\u2019t get this coveted job on her own merit, is hurt. Elizabeth also ends up revealing that it was Greg\u2019s idea for his wife to get Katie the gig in the first place, which further shatters Katie\u2019s self-confidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I like that this challenges Katie\u2019s relationship with the two people closest to her, and makes her question her purpose. As she tells Greg when she confronts him, if he hadn\u2019t made her stay at Ludlow at the start of the semester, she would\u2019ve gotten away from this tiny place and away from Archie\u2019s shenanigans. She could\u2019ve gotten a fresh start outside her comfort zone, just like Greg did when he settled into his role on campus. This pivotal conversation lets Clive tap into Katie\u2019s emotional side, giving the character a lot more depth. As happy as I was to see Katie stand up for herself, she did have me rolling my eyes by the end.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While drowning her sorrows by eating pies at the diner, she runs into Archie, who is facing a career dilemma of his own. The book draft he sent (while suffering from writer\u2019s block, under a looming deadline, and, seemingly, while high on cocaine) has unsurprisingly turned out to be a flop. His publisher has informed him that they won\u2019t be moving forward with it. And while Sunny wasn\u2019t necessarily able to comfort him, Katie does exactly that, reminding him that he\u2019s a persuasive guy who makes things happen for him. I know I\u2019ve complained a lot about Archie\u2019s characterization here, and I\u2019ll stand by it, but I can\u2019t deny that Phil Dunster does have the ability to make his jerk characters be appealing when he wants them to be. Plus, Dunster and Clive do have chemistry. Still, I was yelling at Katie because she\u2019s swayed by the speech he wrote to woo her back. She wants to make her own mistakes now, so she gives in, kisses him, and says the ball is in his court on whether or not they should get back together. Ugh.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The timing is awful because Archie knows Sunny has offered to turn down her dream job in New York City to stay with him, so they can raise their baby together instead of trying out long distance. Plus, when Sunny admits this to Walt, he gives her solid advice: to make sure that Archie is as committed to her as she is to him, which we all know he isn\u2019t. This dragged-out arc of Sunny in denial about her man better get resolved by next week\u2019s finale, because in season two, I really want to see her storyline explored outside of his bubble. It\u2019s also why I think Katie\u2019s arc in this episode works, even if it turns out all roads lead to Archie anyway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As for Greg, he spends this episode coaching Ludlow\u2019s dejected hockey team, who have a match coming up with the more talented athletes of Pruitt. He even reaches out to the college\u2019s volatile former coach, Jake (Scott MacArthur), to come and give the team a push. But Jake, who is still in a recovery program, only gets the players all riled up by making them angry. It leads to the game turning weirdly violent, but it\u2019s fine because Ludlow wins the match anyway. It\u2019s good news because, if not, the board was planning to cut the hockey team entirely. Greg is put on a pedestal once more. His writer-in-residence gig might be wrapping up in a week, but with Jake not ready to return to work, maybe Greg will have a whole new job when Rooster returns for season two.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stray observations<\/p>\n
\u2022 I\u2019m bummed that the show doesn\u2019t know what to do with Robby Hoffman. She repeatedly pops into every episode as Mo and makes a passing remark about how much Archie sucks. Come on, give Hoffman more to do!\u00a0
\n\u2022 Ditto for Scott MacArthur. At least Netflix\u2019s Running Point knows what to do with the actor.\u00a0
\n\u2022 So, Jake and Cristle are about to be the show\u2019s next new couple, huh?
\n\u2022 Katie: \u201cI can be fun when I want to. I just often don\u2019t want to.\u201d\u00a0
\n\u2022 Who else thought it was totally against character for Elizabeth to bemoan the fact that Greg has started to properly move on? It contradicts everything her character has been built up to be.\u00a0
\n\u2022 My one wish for the finale next week is for someone, anyone, to burn down Walt\u2019s sauna. Wouldn\u2019t that be a full circle moment for a season that began with Katie setting fire to Archie\u2019s house?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club\u2018s TV critic.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rooster is designed to be The Steve Carell Show. It hinges on the actor\u2019s charm, which he delivers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":["post-411015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}