Sitcom mastermind Bill Lawrence isn’t shy about reusing his favorite scene-stealers — or rewarding eagle-eyed fans with the occasional Easter egg.
Case in point: “Rooster” Season 1, Episode 3 — now streaming on HBO Max — opens on Greg spending one last lonely night in his Florida condo, watching a hockey game before relocating north to start his new gig as writer-in-residence at Ludlow College. Restless, he picks up a coin and free-throws it into a nearby jar of pennies. Sound familiar?
As Lawrence confirmed during a recent sit-down in New York City, that is indeed a Penny Can Easter egg for fans of his former ABC-turned-TBS comedy “Cougar Town.”
So why not make it an official Bobby Cobb penny can, connecting “Rooster” to “Cougar Town” as part of a larger Bill Lawrence Cinematic Universe? For one, the former is a Warner Bros. property, while the latter is owned by Disney. But that wasn’t going to stop Lawrence from sneaking something in from one of his other shows. And it’s hardly the first time he’s done so.
In fact, as Lawrence noted, in the original “Scrubs” finale, “Zach [Braff] has the exact four same lines of dialogue that [Michael J.] Fox had to Carl Gugino in the pilot of ‘Spin City.'” See for yourself below:
Cougar Town Easter Egg Revealed
But Lawrence’s love of callbacks isn’t limited to props and punchlines. “Rooster” is also packed with familiar faces from across his TV résumé, including series regulars John C. McGinley (“Scrubs,” “Ground Floor”) and Phil Dunster (“Ted Lasso”), as well as Alan Ruck and Connie Britton (“Spin City”), Rory Scovel (“Ground Floor,” “Undateable”), and Rick Glassman (“Undateable”) — a trend he was more than happy to discuss.
“I’ve been often accused of hiring the same people over and over, and I say, what a great gift to get to spend time with talented people that you would want to spend time with anyway,” he tells TVLine. “I’m going to keep doing it and no one can stop me.”
“[‘Rooster’ co-creator] Matt [Tarses] was nice enough to let me hire some of these people for two reasons: One is TV now — you have to grab an audience and grab the characters’ voices so quickly,” Lawrence continues. “I’m a dinosaur. We used to have [so many more] episodes, so you would get to know the characters. Now if people don’t think that that father and daughter is real or those friendships are real within two episodes, they move to one of the other thousand shows. So that shorthand is very helpful.”
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