Summary
Rooster is at its best in “Cop Hawk”, where it embraces all its best elements and leans into what works about the comedy and drama.
The secret to most Bill Lawrence shows is that you want to spend time with their characters. You like them, as you would your own friends. But the reason they’re likeable is that they’re not bound by any real-world logic. The only authentic thing about them is that they’re nice people, almost exclusively. Lawrence doesn’t really do villains; he does well-intentioned professionals and children-of-professionals who’re varying degrees of self-destructive. In Rooster, there is a kind of villain who returns at the end of Episode 6, but it feels at its best when it’s leaning into all the Lawrence-isms, the heightened, often improbable scenarios that emerge when the characters put other people ahead of themselves, their jobs, and commonly accepted ethical standards.
There’s loads of this throughout “Cop Hawk”, but you feel it mostly strongly in two subplots, one about Greg inviting Tommy to live with him temporarily after learning that he’s unhoused after a fall-out with his parents, and the other about Katie falling out and then reconciling with Zoey, the student who has been spearheading the aggressive anti-Archie “For Katie” t-shirt and graffiti campaign. They’re both variations of the same theme, but they’re interesting for slightly different reasons.
We’ll start with Greg, whose entire character at this point boils down to, essentially, everyone liking him much more than they expect to. This is especially true of his students, since the point is repeatedly made that he’s not a great teacher, his class is really easy, and he doesn’t suit the campus environment. But he’s such a nice dude that everyone loves him anyway, especially Tommy.
But Greg’s relationship with Tommy, despite being ludicrous, feels genuine. Greg isn’t trying to go Full Frat. He’s trying to be a surrogate father figure, and he’s succeeding, introducing Tommy and his friends to healthier snacks, better studying practices, and, importantly, refusing to sully Cristle’s good name by going into detail about their sex life. And that’s the other thing. Greg and Cristle are enjoying pretty substantial bedroom chemistry, but she expects their relationship to become more serious, and Greg isn’t ready for that kind of commitment, leading to a bit of a quandary and a last-second cliffhanger that we’ll get to in a minute.
In the meantime, Katie’s predicament with Zoey is more nuanced. Initially, although unprofessionally, she treated Zoey as a friend and confidante because her feelings about Archie cheating on her with a student, much less getting that student pregnant, were pretty uncomplicated. Now, though, after they fell into bed together last week, Katie’s feelings about Archie are more complex, so her feelings about Zoey’s feelings about Archie follow suit. This leads her to lash out at Zoey, then regret the outburst and have to make amends, but it’s handled in a surprisingly tender way that does a lot for Katie’s character.
Before we get into that aforementioned twist ending, we might as well mention a couple of the other minor threads that crop up in Rooster Episode 6. One of them is Greg’s repeated encounters with Officer Donnie Mullins, although to be fair, they’re each a bit different. The episode’s title, “Cop Hawk”, comes from the first one, which is typically antagonistic (and very funny). The second takes a turn, though, since Greg had earlier saved Donnie’s son from getting punched in the face by a very drunk Coach Jake, so Donnie offers him a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card from Monopoly. It has his name and number on the back, and apparently works for virtually any crime other than murder, so I’m looking forward to seeing how that crops up down the line.
Elsewhere, Dylan, on Greg’s advice, finally starts to treat her interim dean position as a full-time job, just in time for Dean Riggs to return from his brief medical hiatus. It’s nice to see Alan Ruck back being awful – he’s the villain I alluded to at the top – but I suspect this subplot exists more to push Dylan towards Greg. It might have seemed like any potential romance between the two was off the cards, but there’s a moment here in “Cop Hawk” where Katie says offhandedly that Greg should cling to anyone who appreciates his new electric bike, and Dylan visibly shrieks with excitement at the sight of it.
Anyway, about that twist. Earlier in the episode, two things had occurred. One was Greg telling Tommy to go back home as per his parents’ wishes. The other was Greg deciding to give Cristle more of a shot after all, especially after botching their previous dinner. These two worlds collide when Greg goes roaming half-naked around Cristle’s kitchen after a session of what seems like very energetic sex, only to find Tommy standing there. He did go home, after all. Cristle is his mother.
