Summary
Rooster is exactly as good as you’d expect in precisely the way you’d think, at least as far as the premiere is concerned, anchored by a superb Steve Carell performance.
Rooster was always going to be good. A dramedy from the creators of Ted Lasso, Shrinking, and Scrubs, starring Steve Carell as a bumbling author intervening in the spiralling love life of his daughter and her cheating husband against the backdrop of a liberal arts college campus? Sometimes these things just write themselves. As of Episode 1, Rooster is exactly as good as you’d expect, in exactly the way you were thinking.
It’s tempting to leave the recap here and knock off for lunch, but that’d probably be selling things short. This premiere introduces quite a few different dynamics in an unhurried 33 minutes, and since it’s content to allow the particulars to make themselves clear organically, it’s probably a good idea to break down the essential premise and how we leave things, especially since there’s so much more to come over the next few weeks.
So, the gist of it finds Greg Russo visiting the campus of Ludlow, a liberal arts college that he hates, to visit his daughter, Katie, who teaches art history there. A couple of things right out of the gate here: Greg is a pretty successful author of a series of lowbrow genre novels about a character named Rooster, and Katie is in the midst of a sex scandal involving her husband, Archie, also a professor, who has been cheating on her with a grad student.
That sounds a lot like Netflix’s Vladimir, but it quickly skirts beyond any of those comparisons since it’s a very different kind of show. There are some feints in the direction of “woke” students being essentially impossible to teach, especially when it comes to nuanced and interpretive subjects like, you know, art, but this is largely the shtick of college president Walter Mann, who is played with enormous relish by John C. McGinley as a ridiculous older dude who thinks the secret to activating brown fat is a daily sauna and cold plunge combo. This is the second time in the last couple of weeks that I’ve seen him playing an older guy who the times have left behind, and he’s so good at it (the other was in the premiere of the Scrubs reboot).
Greg never went to college, and indeed has a bit of an aversion to the place thanks to his history with Katie’s mother, which will presumably be doled out gradually. A guest Q&A he participates in while he’s around doesn’t go especially well, but most of his focus is on Katie, who is living in a dead hockey coach’s house while trying to figure out what to do with her life now that she has to keep seeing her husband locking lips with a much younger woman.
Greg not fitting in at Ludlow isn’t subtly handled. He has two run-ins with the police in the premiere alone, clearly doesn’t know how he should be acting around anyone, and immediately messes up his relationship with a poet who works at the college by rejecting her offer to go to bed with her, not once but twice. This is the point of Greg, though. He’s the polar opposite of his macho novel hero, a perennially awkward bumbler who is sold to the nines by Steve Carell, returning from his career pivot into drama with a really great and surprisingly understated comic performance.
The trademark sensitivity of a Bill Lawrence show is definitely here in Rooster Episode 1, mostly in the relationship between Greg and Katie, though even that backfires when the former advises the latter to attempt to communicate with Archie. She does, telling him she still loves him and thinks they can work through their problems, a sentiment he reciprocates with a pretty major caveat – his new fling is pregnant. In response, Katie throws him out of his own house and attempts to burn his prized possession, a first edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In so doing, she inadvertently burns down his entire house.
Archie has a thankless role, but he’s also oddly charming, mostly coming across like a sort-of reasonable guy who has made a mistake that is now rapidly running away with him. It’ll be interesting to see how his character evolves across subsequent episodes, and how Rooster contrives to keep Greg on campus, even though he doesn’t want to be there. But given the creative pedigree involved, there’s little doubt in my mind that it’ll be great fun finding out.
