‘Rooster’ Episode 1 review: “Release the Brown Fat”

HBO’s new Steve Carell comedy, Rooster, is warmer and stranger than it has any right to be. And one question in its first episode haunts everything that follows.

The question is: “Why do you hate women?” The student directing the question does so during a guest lecture in a college classroom. The guest is best-selling author Greg Russo (Steve Carell).

And the lecture itself is a moment when he’s supposed to feel celebrated. Instead, he feels vaguely on trial.

“Why do you hate women?”

Greg says he doesn’t hate women. He probably doesn’t. That much is obvious from the way Steve Carell plays him. He crumples into himself, blinking. Like this student has just handed him a live grenade and he can’t figure out where to put it. The student’s complaint is specific, though. Greg’s fictional hero, a beachside detective named Rooster, has a lot of sex with a lot of women. And the sex scenes seem to exist mainly to confirm what a capable man Rooster is.

This is, to be clear, a fair observation about the novels. It is also a question that Greg has never had to answer before. Because Greg writes books that sell well at airports, and no one has ever previously expected them to be literature.

So Greg stammers. And then he does something unexpected. He tells the truth. He doesn’t fully understand why he writes what he writes. But he suspects it has something to do with writing the life he wishes he had.

That moment — that small, uncomfortable, involuntary act of honesty — is what Rooster is made of. And it is the reason the show’s premiere, titled “Release the Brown Fat” (an instruction from the show’s most gloriously weird character, more on him shortly), works as well as it does.

Rooster is a campus dramedy built on midlife panic.

The setup is easy to summarize and harder to convey the texture of. Greg is the author of a wildly popular series of pulpy detective novels whose hero goes by, yes, Rooster. Greg’s books feature characters who have sex and characters who get shot. Usually not the same characters. And they sell briskly to people who want something to read on planes.

Greg himself is recently divorced — his ex-wife cheated on him — and moderately adrift. He gives a reading of his latest book at Ludlow College, a fictional New England liberal arts school with excellent brick and unreasonably beautiful autumn light. This is also where his daughter Katie (Charly Clive) is a professor of art history. And we quickly find out that her own marriage has imploded in ways that Greg doesn’t yet fully understand.

The implosion turns out to involve a cheating scandal and (eventually) a first edition of War and Peace meeting its end. The premiere moves fast and lands its punches precisely. By the time the episode is over, Greg has been offered a writer-in-residence position by Ludlow’s eccentric president (John C. McGinley, playing what is essentially himself), refused it, and then found himself reconsidering. Because his daughter needs him here. Even if she hasn’t said so, and even if “needing him here” and “wanting him here” are not remotely the same thing.

Bill Lawrence’s favorite kind of broken man.

This is Bill Lawrence’s territory. Lawrence, who created Scrubs and Ted Lasso and Shrinking, has spent the better part of twenty-five years writing about men who mean well and mess things up anyway. Men who love their people imperfectly and keep trying. Men who are sometimes asked to be more evolved than they actually are and have to decide whether to perform the evolution or attempt it.

What is worth saying about his particular formula — and it is a formula — is that it works because it comes from somewhere real. Lawrence has explained before that he’s not particularly good at writing things that don’t come from his own life. Rooster reportedly emerged from a development meeting where Lawrence, his co-creator Matt Tarses, and Carell all discovered they had daughters the same age. Their daughters have moved into adulthood and have since pushed their fathers away. And all three of them have been grappling with what that loss feels like. And whether it was appropriate to call it a loss at all.

That’s the show. Everything else — the campus, the novels, the sauna, the house fire — is scaffolding for that central ache.

The sauna prophet.

McGinley plays Walter Mann, Ludlow’s president, as a man who has achieved complete personal philosophy and would very much like to share it with you in a small, very hot room. The sauna scene in the premiere — where Walter sweats Greg into a state of radical honesty about his life choices and then immediately deposits him into a cold plunge before he can reconsider — is the funniest sequence in the episode. And it also functions as the show’s thesis statement about what it believes therapy actually is.

Therapy puts you somewhere uncomfortable. You tell the truth because you are too hot and exhausted to construct an alternative. And that just makes you even more uncomfortable while the world tells you this is what healing should feel like.

McGinley has played this kind of character before, most famously as Dr. Cox on Scrubs, a show that built itself around a tough-love mentor with a genuine heart. The difference with Walter is that Walter believes in wellness rather than medicine. Which has the effect of making his quirky wisdom weirder and more portable. Anyone can build a sauna. The results, Walter would tell you, are scientifically proven.

The hot house is for real talk.

The detail that makes Walter immediately legible as a character — and that Lawrence lifted directly from McGinley’s actual life, something McGinley talked about openly on the Scrubs rewatch podcast  — is a set of rules posted on the sauna wall. “The hot house,” one of them reads, “is for real talk.”

This is a man who has codified his approach to friendship into interior design. This is a man who plays John C. McGinley in a television show about the kind of person John C. McGinley is.  The layers here are unusually rich for a half-hour comedy that premiered on a Sunday night.

What the premiere does most skillfully is use the campus setting to do the thing Dead Poets Society established as the foundational grammar of this grainy film-aesthetic. Which is to make the institution both beautiful and slightly oppressive. Make it a place where tradition and freedom are always in negotiation, and where the new arrival — the teacher or author or father who doesn’t quite belong — serves as the pressure that forces that negotiation into the open.

Steve Carell’s best TV work in years.

The cinematography is warm and gentle in the way only New England autumn allows. The setting is flush with autumnal reds and golds and the uncanny quality of late-afternoon light on stone. It evokes The Holdovers without copying it outright, which is the smart move. The feel of those images is now established enough that you don’t need to reinvent it. You just need to fill it with characters worth watching.

Carell, in this environment, is doing something more interesting than he’s been asked to do in years. Greg is aware of his blunders in real time, which is different from Michael Scott, who was mostly unaware and ignorant. Greg watches himself stumble and cannot stop the stumbling. He stammers through lines that no functional adult would say aloud and does it with exactly enough blamelessness that you believe him when he later confesses, over tequila with Danielle Deadwyler’s poetry professor, that he genuinely doesn’t understand why he does most of the things he does.

Deadwyler, who is one of the best actors working in any medium right now, does a great deal with a role the premiere doesn’t fully open up. She plays it straight in a show disposed toward mild absurdism, which gives her a useful kind of gravity. And the bar scene between her and Carell has a tenderness that suggests the show knows what it has in her even if the script is still figuring out what to do with it.

Why “Rooster” is the whole problem.

Back to that question: Why do you hate women?

And it ties into why “Rooster” is the name for the show’s fictional hero. A rooster is the male principle of the yard. Loud, strutting, commanding, sexually dominant. It’s the fantasy of the barnyard alpha. And Greg has been writing this fantasy for decades and calling it fiction and not asking too hard about what it says about him.

The student’s question is uncomfortable not because she’s wrong but because she’s identified something Greg didn’t know he was doing. He wrote Rooster to be the man he isn’t. The love interest in the Rooster novels is based on his ex-wife. The whole enterprise is a private mythology that turns out, under the lights of a college classroom, to be visible from the outside in ways he never anticipated.

Rooster is, at its center, a show about the gap between the man you narrate yourself as and the man you’re trying to be. Greg’s self-narration is gentle and self-deprecating. He knows he’s not Rooster. But it turns out that narrating yourself as harmless and awkward and well-meaning is its own kind of fiction. And the campus is precisely the institution designed to question fictions.

Can the show survive its own honesty?

The show hasn’t fully reckoned with this yet.  Greg’s various campus blunders are treated as wild accidents rather than as patterns worth examining. The show wants to exonerate him even as it’s staging his trial, and the dissonance isn’t always fun to watch.

Whether that ambivalence is a flaw or the point depends on what Rooster decides it’s actually about once it goes a few layers deeper. The premiere argues that it’s about a father and a daughter, hence it ends with them in frame together. They’re two people unmoored by betrayal, trying to be near each other without admitting they need each other.

And yeah, that’s probably a story worth telling. There’s a version of this show — maybe the version that emerges in episode three or four, once the setup is complete and the real work begins — that makes the heart and soul and comedy more coherent. Where we see the warmth Lawrence always brings to his shows testing itself against the harder question the student asked.

The hot house, after all, is for real talk. Whether Rooster is willing to sit in the heat long enough to get there is the question the season (and HBO) will eventually have to answer.

Rooster airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.

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Images courtesy of HBO Max.