SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the pilot episode of Rooster on HBO Max.
Bill Lawrence’s latest show Rooster, which he co-created with Bad Monkey collaborator Matt Tarses centers Ludlow College, a campus teeming with brilliant professorial minds and students eager to learn from them.
It’s Steve Carell’s character who bridges the gap between those two groups as Greg Russo, author of the famous Rooster beach read books, who comes to guest lecture at the school where his daughter Katie (Charly Clive) teaches. Greg is loosely inspired by Bad Monkey author Carl Hiaasen as Lawrence previously told Deadline, and he never went to college.
“The main thing we liked was the metaphor of, for me, nostalgically, college is where you went to reinvent yourself and decide who you wanted to be,” Lawrence told Deadline. “Very intentionally, we said, Steve’s character never went to college. And why couldn’t a guy in his late 50s use that as a place to decide what he wanted the rest of his life to look like? He could overcome some of the things holding him back.”
The Scrubs and Spin City creator, great-great-grandson of William and Sarah Lawrence who founded Sarah Lawrence college, shared some of his personal background and experiences about higher education, which echoed a bit of what his Shrinking collaborator Harrison Ford shared in his Lifetime Achievement Actors Awards acceptance speech.
“I’ll be candid. I was embarrassed about loving writing and storytelling and theater and all that stuff when I was in high school. I’m ashamed of ever having been embarrassed,” he said. “I played a lot of sports. And I thought ‘Oh, maybe it’s not cool.’ I don’t know, and then college, you get there, and you’re like, ‘Oh, sh-t, it’s okay. Not only is it okay, but all the cool people are doing this stuff. So college is a place where young people get to go reinvent themselves and decide what direction they want to go with their life, if they’re lucky enough to go.”
Tarses attended Williams, and star Carell played hockey at a small liberal arts school — Denison University in Ohio. Initial encounters with Professor Dylan Shepherd (Danielle Deadwyler) and President Walter Mann (John C. McGinley) at Ludlow tease the clash of old guard and new that is taking place on college campuses across America.
Steve Carell in ‘Rooster’ on HBO Max
“It’s very tricky, because we don’t want to land in a political hotbed, right? And universities are all over the place, and so this definitely has a nostalgic vibe,” Lawrence told Deadline. “Right now, those campuses are very transitional, because, in a great way, it’s time for a new guard in a lot of facets of American education and elsewhere.”
The academia and campus setting gives grounds for Lawrence and Tarses to assemble an ensemble of characters connected by their workplace as well as family ties when it comes to Greg, Katie and the university. The co-showrunners wanted to work with Phil Dunster, balancing any similarities his character Archie might have with his Ted Lasso role Jamie Tartt to highlight the actor’s skill of making an unlikeable character likeable, which applies to both the Manchester footballer and the Rooster Russiann studies professor, who is married to Greg’s daughter Katie and who cheated on her with a grad student, Sunny (Lauren Tsai).
“Here’s what you can’t avoid, and it’s why we cast Phil. I thought about it, and Matt did too. He was a completely different character because Jamie Tartt was blue collar and a bit of a punk [from] the wrong side of the tracks, and [Archie’s] posh and highly educated and pretentious and a wordsmith,” Lawrence said. “The reason that I work with people over and over again, if I think they’re super talented, A, and B, they’re people I want to spend time with anyways. Phil is both of those, and he has this outrageously great quality for an actor, which is he can do reprehensible things without you ever going, ‘Oh, I f–king hate that.’ And that is a gift, and I was not going to let it out of my world.”
L-R: Lauren Tsai and Phil Dunster in ‘Rooster’ on HBO Max
A confrontation between Greg and Archie in the pilot episode, in which Archie’s prized possession first ideation of Leo Tolstoy’s War And Peace gets brought up, stemmed from a real-life occurrence between Lawrence and Tarses in the writer’s room. Carell’s confusion of Anton Chekhov and Tolstoy leads him to bring up a quote from Checkhov: “No one must be humiliated.”
“It’s part of the ethos for the show. ‘You can’t embarrass [anyone],” Lawrence said. “But that joke exists on some level because Matt Tarses is so much smarter than I am, and so much more book smart,” Lawrence said. “When we were doing the War And Peace thing that he had, I thought that was written by Chekhov, you know, because I’m a dummy. So that became the joke that [Greg] would have looked up all sorts of smart things to say based on Chekhov and not on Tolstoy.”
Unfortunately, that book does not survive the pilot episode because Katie sets fire to it in a fit of rage after Archie later tells her that Sunny is pregnant.
Charly Clive in ‘Rooster’ on HBO Max
“Katie got to this school [and] she didn’t build relationships because she just met a significant other, a partner, right away and became — which I think happens to lots of young men and young women became his partner — rather than her own self,” Lawrence said of Charly Clive’s character.
Loneliness is a theme to keep lookout for as the show continues, according to Lawrence.
“A lot of the characters are intentionally — Greg’s lonely. Walt, I think he says, ‘I’m painfully lonely.’ His wife’s gone for half the year. [Dylan] talks about, in the pilot of, ‘You ever feel surrounded by people, but still really alone?” he said. “If you if he want me to get personal, [it’s] really hard when your kids leave. Mmy daughter’s off on her own. My boys, ones graduated from college. One just left for NYU. In Shrinking, we pretend my wife [Christa Miller who plays] Liz is the one that’s fearing the empty nest. In real life, Christa was like ‘Peace.’ And I was like ‘What am I supposed to do now? I’m so lonely. Where’s all the noise? Where’s all the chaos?’”
New episodes of Rooster will arrive weekly on HBO Max on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. ET.