‘Rooster’ Episode 2 Recap – Wonderfully Consistent Comedy, Questionable Drama

Steve Carell made a handy focal point for Rooster, and his reluctant bumbling is what helped to situate us at Ludlow and get a sense of the main players in HBO’s dramedy. But Episode 2 almost considers him surplus to requirements. He’s still here, and everything he does and says is still funny, but now that the bedding-in is complete, it’s clear this isn’t just a one-horse race. The scattershot approach to “Trousers” is a bit more chaotic than the premiere was, but the density of truly great one-liners, unexpected payoffs to throwaway gags, and lovely moments of absurdity and physical comedy make the trade-off more or less worth it.

Carell’s Greg, it’s worth reminding everyone, isn’t even a permanent fixture on campus (yet). He was only there to help Katie in her hour of need, and he’s only lingering since that need has extended way beyond the allotted sixty minutes, since she has burned down a historically significant faculty building. Ironically, given that an early scene of “Trousers” is a police interview wherein Katie has to give her potentially illegal version of events, Archie has already forgiven her intentional immolation of his most prized possession and her accidental immolation of his entire home and everything else he owns. The situation isn’t going to become a legal predicament. But Katie is still so annoyed about not only the affair but Archie having gotten Sunny knocked up that she punches him in the face when he has the temerity to suggest that forgiveness might have been warranted in the first place.

In other words, Katie isn’t helping herself. And since Greg can’t justify leaving until she does, the broad sweep of the episode, at least as far as these two are concerned, is him trying to convince Katie to fight for her job, which is now threatened thanks to the increasingly public disgrace. Katie has decided that she’s done, but Greg can’t accept that for her because he thinks she’s repeating his mistake of running away as soon as things get hard. But he also can’t get out of her way because his reflexive helicopter parenting compels him to swoop in and solve every issue she has, including this one, which he has been doing throughout her life and has denied her the requisite skills in dealing with the kind of adversity she’s now facing. In short, Greg can’t win.

It’s the swooping that compels Greg to overcommit and accept the writer-in-residence position from Walt after he tries to campaign for Katie’s job back, which she doesn’t find out about until the very end of the episode. In the meantime, she thinks she’s taking some initiative. Greg helps her pen an apology letter after a hasty email resignation – Walt’s giant font and Greg’s reaction to it got a real laugh out of me – but she doesn’t realise her being re-hired is contingent on Greg taking the writer-in-residence position, just as he doesn’t realise that Katie’s anger with Archie was on account of his getting Sunny pregnant. When Katie lets that slip, Greg rushes to assault Archie, who just so happens to be live on a BBC interview since he’s considered one of the foremost experts on Russian relations.

For Archie, this is just the latest in a long string of indignities visited upon him by Rooster Episode 2. For what it’s worth, I do really like what the show’s doing with this character, since it would have been all too easy to vilify him. Instead, he’s mostly just a bit of an idiot who couldn’t decide what he wanted and is now completely trapped by circumstances outside of his control. He clearly still loves Katie, but Sunny’s decision to keep the baby that he doesn’t want means that he’s never going to be able to meaningfully rebuild that marriage without some serious compromises being made, and he just seems a bit too nice, too conflict-averse, to be able to fix this situation without making it much worse in the meantime.

What the show is doing with Sunny herself is a bit more inscrutable. We meet her properly in “Trousers”, and we learn a few things about her, including that she’s very smart and seems to embody precisely none of the qualities that you’d typically associate with a college student sleeping with a professor (maybe Tell Me Lies has just skewed my perspective here). But she doesn’t seem especially into Archie, despite being determined to keep the baby and assuming – perhaps naively – that he’ll be all in on raising it with her. She even asks him to move in with her and her roommate, who clearly hates him, as though this reflects some sort of adult stability. It’s just an odd dynamic that I’m not sure about, but perhaps that’s because it has been framed entirely in Archie’s point of view thus far, and he’s really clearly not into it.

Time will tell. But what we know in the meantime is that Rooster is very funny, I think more so than even a masterpiece like Shrinking, which tends to lean more heavily into drama. Thus far, I’m less compelled by the predicaments of the characters, but I rarely stop laughing for long enough to care, even in totally random little asides like the student in Dylan’s poetry class who asks a guy named Eli if he wants to get pegged and he replies, simply, “I have asthma”. If the comedy continues to work this well, I’ll be happy to give Rooster plenty of time to find its feet.