“The Rooster” could be considered the third entry in what I’ll refer to as Bill Lawrence’s “Lovely White Guy Fails” Trilogy, assuming, of course, he stops at three. The first was “Ted Lasso,” which was co-created by Lawrence, Joe Kelly, Brendan Hunt and Jason Sudeikis and famously focused on an American football coach who was hired to lead the English football team despite not being familiar with the basic rules of the sport. The second was “Shrinking,” co-created by Lawrence, Jason Segel, and Brett Goldstein, a drama about a therapist named Jimmy (Segel) who breaks almost every ethical boundary that should be maintained between a mental health professional and his patients.
Now we have number 3, “Rooster,” the HBO series Lawrence dreamed up with Matt Tarses, writer and executive producer on two of Lawrence’s previous projects, “Scrubs” and “Bad Monkey.” That latest episode doesn’t qualify as a “White Guy Fails” show because disgraced cop Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn) doesn’t care as much about being liked by other people as these other leading men do.
In “Rooster,” that leading man is Greg Russo (Steve Carell), a best-selling author at a chain of airport bookstores that focuses on a superhero named Rooster. The series begins as Greg arrives to speak at Ludlow College, a university in New England where his daughter Katie (Charly Clive, best known for her role in the British series “Pure”) is a professor of art history.
Before the first episode ended, Greg explained that failed speech—”Why do you hate women?” one conflicted reader asks her—on the chance to insert herself into Katie’s personal dramas, which primarily involve the breakdown of her marriage to professor Archie (“Ted Lasso’s” Phil Dunster). He also reluctantly accepts a writer’s gig that makes him a temporary member of the same faculty as his offspring. That means Greg will be in Katie’s business for the foreseeable future, or at least for most of the first season. (HBO shared six of the first season’s ten episodes for review by critics.)
The building blocks in Greg’s DNA are very similar to those found in Ted’s and Jimmy’s genetic makeup. Greg is depressed and lonely because of a woman, this time, the wife he broke up with five years earlier and never stopped loving. (She’s played by Connie Britton, which explains, at least in part, why Greg hasn’t gotten over her yet.) She’s found great success despite plenty of evidence that maybe she shouldn’t be as successful as she is. This man, a published author, admits that he has never read “Moby Dick.” He also abandons the discussion activity in class when he realizes that he does not know how to spell the words that his students suggest he write on the white board. (“Conscientious” is impassable. So is “unreasonable.”)
Greg is disciplined for the many incidents of misconduct that “The Rooster” portrays as wild accidents that are not at all the man’s fault, but rather, reflect the extreme nature of modern university life. That’s why, one time, I wrote in my notes: “Did he really have to fall on that girl’s breasts?” The world may be full of horrible men, but this show wants us to know that Greg is not one of them. He’s confused and depressed and deals with his feelings by listening to music on a coffee shop playlist specifically for melancholy Gen Xers. “This song is how I feel every day,” he mumbled drunkenly at a party, a place where a professor should definitely be not be, while listening repeatedly to “Everybody Hurts” by REM Like heroes in the Bill Lawrence-iverse, but especially Jimmy by Segel, Greg believes that the lack of proper professional boundaries can put him in some way on the path towards his birth. Which is a strange philosophy of life.
And yet, like Lawrence’s other plays, “The Rooster” is breezy and engaging to watch, as long as you don’t allow yourself to think too hard about what it’s trying to say. It helps a lot that Greg is played by Carell, an actor who knows how to weave cringiness and warm personality into the same performance. Giving him this role is like asking LeBron James to take it easy. He is the one who makes it possible to think that Greg could be a real person, rather than a caricature of someone who is always in a difficult situation. (Did I mention that Greg goes too, starts doing the “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance to make it seem like he’s on purpose, and then gets slapped by the college seniors for being culturally insensitive? He does. He really does.)
The entire series is well distributed, but something stands out. Danielle Deadwyler doesn’t suffer fools in the most delightful way possible as the writing and literature professor who befriends Greg; it’s good to see him follow up his best show in the fourth season of “The Bear” with more proof of his comedic skills. Rory Scovell appears in several episodes as a busy local cop who, arguably, has less going on in the detective department than Deputy Andy Brennan of “Twin Peaks.” But Scovell infuses his own idiosyncratic indifference into this boy, a cop who repeatedly forgets where he left his gun and once dropped out of high school to follow Limp Bizkit on a tour. He describes that second experience with an irrational love that is irrationally lovable.
Then there’s John C. McGinley, who gets to channel his gift for playing arrogant blowhards—see Dr. Perry Cox from Lawrence’s “Scrubs”—to Walter Mann, the president of Ludlow College, who would rather make a mistake than be involved in the business of running a university. McGinley delivers all his lines as if Walter is a hustling boxer who just needs to get some work done before his next appointment. “You look ridiculous, Greg,” he barks before Greg finishes apologizing for criticizing Walter’s wife’s kimono. “You’ve got sticks. in his hair, for God’s sake.” All comments are punch. All jokes stay.
As good as these characters are, they can’t overcome the fact that “The Rooster” is too flexible to be effective. This comedy asks us to believe and root for its characters because they are decent people trying their best. However, it forces those characters to do things that make them appear as rivals. “Rooster” wants us to empathize with the realities these people face while putting them in very unusual situations. Again, this is true of much of Lawrence’s work. But for its first two seasons at least, “Ted Lasso” offered enough cozy charms to make those inconsistencies easy to overlook. “Shrinking,” on the other hand, has Harrison Ford, a Hollywood-legend-style bullshit-detector, who keeps the show tethered to Earth. But at least in its first six episodes, “Rooster” is still trying, almost as awkwardly as Greg, to find its center of gravity.
Six episodes were screened for review. Premieres on HBO Sunday, March 8, 2026.
