Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 9, 2026
Rooster is among five Bill Lawrence-produced shows that will air this year (along with Shrinking, the Scrubs revival, another season of Ted Lasso, and a second Bad Monkey season). This one pairs Lawrence with his longtime producing partner Matt Tarses (Scrubs, Sports Night) and is set in the world of academia at a New England liberal arts college. It’s a surprisingly thin genre for television. Sandra Oh and Bob Odenkirk have taken stabs at it in recent years with minimal commercial success in The Chair and Lucky Hank, respectively, although both shows were pretty great. (Netflix also launched Rachel Weisz’s Vladimir this week — review forthcoming.)
It’s a world rich with possibility if it can get buy-in from the audience, and who better to deliver that than Bill Lawrence and Steve Carell. Rooster immediately recalled to me, at least, the novels of Richard Russo (upon which Lucky Hank was also based), which may be why Carell’s character is named Greg Russo. But ultimately, no matter where Lawrence’s shows are set — a hospital, a therapist’s office, a soccer field, or a cul-de-sac — they generally settle into rich, funny character ensembles, and I suspect Rooster won’t be much different.
The pilot, at least, shows a lot of promise. Carell’s Greg Russo is the author of beach reads featuring his Rooster character. He returns to Ludlow College, where his wife left him 25 years ago and where his daughter now teaches, ostensibly for a book reading, but really to check in on Katie (Charly Clive), whose husband, Archie (Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster), has left her for a grad student (how very cliché).
Russo is socially bumbling and feels inadequate in an academic setting — he never attended college — but he’s embraced by the college president, Walter Mann (played by John C. McGinley, which may explain his minimal role in the Scrubs revival so far), a gregarious man who feels the same way about campus safe-space culture that Dr. Cox feels about medical students. Despite Russo’s lack of formal education, Mann asks him to stay on as writer-in-residence, which Russo is likely to accept in order to help his daughter navigate the fallout of Archie’s affair. By the end of the pilot, Archie’s girlfriend is pregnant, and Katie has accidentally burned down Archie’s house.
The academic world feels like a more adult setting for Lawrence, but Carell’s character and the situations he stumbles into remain broadly comedic, and Lawrence and Tarses have assembled a powerhouse supporting cast to match: Rory Scovell, Annie Mumulo, Scott MacArthur, and Robby Hoffman, all joining the tremendous Danielle Deadwyler as Dylan, Russo’s potential love interest (Connie Britton and Alan Ruck, from Lawrence’s Spin City days, also have a recurring roles).
Carell and Lawrence really do feel like a natural pairing, and it’s a blast to watch Carell work opposite John C. McGinley and to see, once again, Phil Dunster play a charming prick. There’s not much to go on with just the pilot, but it feels like a Bill Lawrence series — only in a slightly elevated setting, with our entry point into that world being an outsider to it, even as the comic situations themselves remain vintage Lawrence.
It’s too early to say whether Rooster will follow in the one-season-and-done footsteps of The Chair and Lucky Hank, but if anyone can pull this off, it’s Lawrence and Carell in the friendly confines of HBO. The reviews I’ve seen so far have been mixed — but it’s worth noting that so were the initial reviews for Ted Lasso. Despite a decades-long run of hits, Lawrence still doesn’t always get the benefit of the doubt.
