One of the best reasons to ever attend college is to have the space to remake yourself. The campus grounds are an open terrarium for growth and self-discovery. But you don’t have to be an 18-year-old froshy to undergo meaningful metamorphosis. You could be 63-year-old Steve Carell, who is phenomenal as he’s born anew in the new HBO comedy Rooster. What? You thought you’ve seen it all from an Oscar-nominated A-lister? Rooster shows that even the tried-and-true can still surprise you.
Premiering March 8, Rooster is the new feel-good comfort comedy from Ted Lasso and Shrinking creator Bill Lawrence. Carell stars as Greg, a successful novelist who takes a job teaching at a Boston university to get closer to his daughter (Charly Clive), who is picking up the pieces of her life after her husband sleeps with a grad student. Unlike the suave James Bond-esque antihero of his pulpy page-turners, Greg bumbles through his new life while remaking the lives of his own students along the way.
If the premise inspires you to regurgitate lunch, trust me when I say Rooster is a damn miracle. It walks in step with other Bill Lawrence shows: cozy sitcoms where snappy writing and quirky, flawed characters with hearts of gold are all on honor roll. These elements made Ted Lasso special in 2020, and funneled audiences to Shrinking after Ted Lasso grew saccharine and, let’s admit, dumb. Inevitably, Rooster often comes off like Lawrence et al. revisiting the same well and dipping their buckets a little deeper this time.
Whatever advantages Rooster has is owed to its cast, Charly Clive and Lauren Tsai (both revelations) among them. But Carell is unusually good, even by his own standards. He’s standing confidently in his silver fox era, his age lending him wisdom as an artist. His timing is sharper than an expensive pen, his knack for buoying his younger scene partners an underrated superpower. For once, that unmistakable voice of his, oscillating between nasal nebbishness and deep-thinking paternal figure, actually makes sense for an instructor who—and I’m sorry about this—is learning alongside his students. Credit is owed to Lawrence too, who seems to know post-Lasso that just putting a Good Guy™ in a minefield environment like the modern liberal arts college isn’t enough for a worthwhile TV show. These men need to have genuine flaws to feel human. The man who breathed life into Michael Scott to life was certainly up to the task.
It was just over two decades ago when the world got properly acquainted with Steve Carell. In 2005, both The 40-Year-Old Virgin hit theaters and The Office premiered on network TV (and later, iTunes, a pivotal moment in modern media distribution). On TV, Carell was the dopey middle manager who comically overestimated his abilities. In the first few seasons of The Office, Michael embodied the mediocrity of leadership; he failed upward, and his good intentions backfired. (“Scott’s Tots” is, deservingly, a classic episode.) His mall outlet suits and hair slicked with Dep reeked of loserdom. The culture was fresh from Gen X media like Falling Down, Fight Club, Office Space, and The Matrix, which all championed individuality over the imprisonment of cubicles and neckties. Michael Scott was Gen X’s reheated leftovers served to millennials, so it’s unsurprising that the wide space once afforded to episodic television naively evolved him into a misunderstood hero and not permanently the tool of unseen capitalist overlords.
After 2005, you could not escape the man on all those 40-Year-Old Virgin posters if you tried. (Sure, he was also the weirdo in Anchorman, but it’s hard to be thought of as a true star behind serial killer glasses) His humble start as a correspondent on The Daily Show has given way to garden-variety A-list fame: More hit comedies, acclaimed indies, cartoon franchises, even an Oscar nom. But I don’t blame you if his presence in a thing doesn’t inspire thrills. In weepy awards bait or whatever Adam McKay has cooked up, you expect Carell to work within his wavelength. He can be a loving dad or a sociopath with inordinate power. or something in between. You can’t hate on Carell for exploring his range, but you’d be forgiven for being bored by it all.
Steve Carell is unusually good in Rooster, even by his own standards.
Which is why I’m speechless that I was never bored by Rooster. What should have been a losing combination of pieces has amounted to a greater whole than I anticipated. It’s a throwback to Ted Lasso in its prime, when its hunky-dory atmosphere and deep sincerity felt inviting, before it got off-putting. Mostly, I’m suddenly endeared to Carell, whose work I haven’t loved since The Big Short. While I keep a soft spot for his DVD indies and studio rom-coms—Crazy, Stupid, Love is a crazy, smart movie—I’ve never found his prestige efforts interesting in the slightest. (I still question if he even deserved his nomination for Foxcatcher.) To say nothing of the embarrassment of working with Woody Allen in the 2010s or the wretched Space Force. Rooster single-handedly turned me around, even if I’ll still never watch a Despicable Me sequel on my own accord.
In an episode halfway through Rooster‘s first season, a student tells Greg that college is the place to reinvent oneself, and that it isn’t exclusive to the students. It’s clear that Carell, learned as he already is, has done his homework.
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