Summary
Rooster still has its moments in “Nobody Spook It”, but the familiar holding pattern suggests we might have already seen all this show has to offer.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’m not sure Rooster is really going anywhere. I keep giving it a chance to, and Episode 8 is not without its great lines and simple pleasures, but throughout “Nobody Spook It” I did find myself wondering whether this might be it. I’m not sure the show has any more to offer than what it has already given us, and it seems a little uncharacteristically hesitant to indulge in anything else.
And the potential is right there, too. There are more daring, more interesting versions of basically every subplot sitting directly adjacent to the more comfortable ones we’re getting, and it’s a weird feeling, since Bill Lawrence is generally good at putting likeable characters in unusual relationships and then having them deal with serious predicaments. The most serious predicament in this show – which would be everything involving Katie, Archie, and Sunny, if you’re keeping score – is the most oddly neglected aspect of the narrative.
Greg, for instance, gets a ton of airtime, which is fine, but he also hasn’t meaningfully changed in the last several episodes. The hook was supposed to be about the difficulties of an airport potboiler author adapting to modern campus life, but outside of those slapstick-y earlier episodes, Greg took to being a teacher like a duck to water, so there’s no real tension there. Katie has deliberately kept him out of her love triangle, and even Greg’s surrogate fatherhood of Tommy took a hiatus last week after that last-minute stinger when Tommy discovered that Greg was banging his mom, Cristle (and inadvertently saw his penis, which he still hasn’t gotten over).
The good news is that Tommy is mostly over that now, and that Katie has finally decided to tell Greg the truth about Archie, though that last one occurs right at the end of “Nobody Spook It”, so we won’t see the fallout until next time. The bad news is that everyone else feels like they’re being held in stasis. The only joke involving Walt remains that he’s partial to a sauna, and I have absolutely no idea what we’re supposed to think about Sunny. She makes a big decision in this episode to turn down a prestigious job in New York to raise her baby in New England with Archie, but it seems to be based on nothing at all beyond finally seeing Archie take an interest in the child’s existence, which you’d think would be the bare minimum.
This sounds like a nitpick, but it causes a ton of problems. Sunny seems to detest Archie, understandably, and Archie seems totally uninterested in Sunny. That means we don’t buy her decision, and we don’t buy his previous decision to stick with her, even though you can rationalize it on the basis of being there for the kid. But if we don’t buy Sunny and Archie together, then it also feels weird that Archie chose Sunny when he’s clearly more into Katie, and it feels weirder that Katie cares about Archie, because he’s acting like such a whiny, narcissistic man-child. As I said at the top, this is the show’s most serious subplot, and virtually none of it works (although Katie crying about eating three croissants at a time is pretty funny. Charley Clive is so good in this).
Elsewhere in Rooster Episode 8, there are multiple more minor issues to unpack. There’s a funny thread between Greg and Cristle, which involves them trying to figure out how best to navigate the office given their recent dalliances, and it’s funny, though it mostly exists just to put the relationship to bed. Greg has bigger concerns, anyway, namely making sure that Tommy doesn’t needlessly drop out of college, which he accomplishes by nurturing his writing talent and using his “Get Out of Jail Free” card to force Donnie into talking him out of becoming a cop.
We also get a little more of Dylan, who tries to convince one of her students, Eva, to stick with poetry despite her seeing it as frivolous and not a viable career path. There’s an earnest enthusiasm for the arts here that feels more characteristic of something like American Classic than the rest of this show, which is curiously reluctant to dig into these ideas – it’s the same with Greg’s writing – when it could be reminding us that Walt follows his sauna with an ice bath. I hope that in the final couple of episodes, it finds something a bit more interesting to focus on.
