‘Rooster’ Review: Crazy, Stupid, Love With A Different Font

If you look at the comedic body of work of Steve Carell, he might not have the flashiest resume at first glance, but as you dig deeper, you realize just how absolutely loaded his career has been. The Office, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine, The Big Short, Crazy Stupid Love, the Anchorman films and a lot more. That’s not even mentioning his great dramatic work like in Beautiful Boy and The Way, Way Back.

Bill Lawrence is on that same boat—Spin City, Clone High, Scrubs, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking is an incredible resume. So when you put the two together, it’s not surprising in the slightest that they have a hit on their hands.

Rooster follows Greg Russo (Steve Carell), an author of the world-famous book series “The Rooster,” who is on a visit as a guest lecturer at Ludlow College. His daughter Katy (Charlie Clive) also works as a professor there, and her life is currently in turmoil after her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), also a professor there, cheated on her with a grad student, and now everybody at the school knows. While Greg really doesn’t want to be at Ludlow very long, it becomes clear that he must stay for his daughter.

Steve Carell’s best comedic ability is that he is a true double threat. What I mean by that is he can play the straight man ala Crazy, Stupid, Love, but he can also play the absurdity of a Michael Scott perfectly. In Rooster, he is more akin to Crazy, Stupid, Love‘s Cal Weaver, which he’s quite fun as.

The similarities to Crazy, Stupid, Love don’t come close to ending there. Rooster tackles many of the same topics around cheating and relationships in a very similar manner, even down to some specific character and plot beats. The only thing missing is someone as magnetic as Ryan Gosling to steal the show but even without that, this show does a surprisingly good job of reeling you in.

A large part of that is the great cast surrounding Carell, including but not limited to Danielle Deadwyler, Charly Clive, Phil Dunster, and John C. McGinley. McGinley in particular is absolutely fantastic as the college’s president. He is the comedic heartbeat of this show, and every scene he’s in is a good one. Scott MacArthur is also perfect in his limited scenes as an incompetent local cop. He’s reminiscent of Ted McGinley from Season 1 of Shrinking, where he might not always be present, but every time he’s in a scene, you feel his presence on screen.

Deadwyler also offers a very warm presence to the show, especially when she shares the screen with Carell. The storylines involving Dunster and Clive’s Archie and Katy are mostly the only thing pushing the plot forward episode to episode, which does make some of it feel repetitive, but it also features some of the best moments of the show thus far, so it’s a give and take.

Rooster isn’t the funniest show in the world, but there are pockets where it is able to fire on all cylinders, especially when it catches you off guard with its humor. There are some typical moments you’d find in a show like this that aren’t all that engrossing, mostly just the drama that, on paper, should work, but it doesn’t quite translate onto the screen.

Bill Lawrence thrives in making easy, simple watches that make you feel better even ever so marginally, and Rooster is exactly that. It might not have had the highs that Shrinking or Ted Lasso had in their first seasons, but it has a lot of potential to get there. For the most part, the show gets better as it goes. This review is based on 6 episodes of a 10-episode season, so this show very well could get even better.

Rooster is set to release on March 8th on HBO and HBO Max at 10PM EST. The show is created by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses and stars Steve Carell, Danielle Deadwyler, Charly Clive, Phil Dunster, John C. McGinley, and Lauren Tsai.

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