Here’s a crazy casting idea: Steve Carell as a clueless blunderer unable to grasp even the most rudimentary of social cues. Sure, the former star of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Dinner for Schmucks, and a dozen other variations on the theme has been playing that type for more than 20 years, but supply is still barely keeping up with demand. If, as memory insists, the America of my childhood saw itself as Indiana Jones, cracking whips until the nations fell in line, the anxious generation’s avatar of choice is unquestionably The Office’s Michael Scott.
Carell’s latest schlub is Greg Russo, protagonist of HBO’s new campus dramedy, Rooster. A popular novelist in the James Patterson vein, Greg writes the kind of books in which “the characters you like have sex, [while] the ones you don’t get shot in the face.” As the series opens, our hero is guest-lecturing at New England’s Ludlow College, a liberal-arts institution where his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), teaches. There, persuaded by flaky president Walter Mann (John C. McGinley) to stay on, Greg settles down to a term as visiting writer, unofficial campus mascot, and general meddler in others’ affairs.
In typical college-campus fashion, these dealings comprise a curious mix of the professional and the personal. Annoyed by Mann’s insistence that Ludlow’s poetry magazine move online, English professor Dylan Shepard (Danielle Deadwyler) salves her feelings by attempting to seduce Greg. Employed alongside her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), Katie must navigate both the practical and emotional consequences of his infidelity with a student (Lauren Tsai). In these and other moments, Carell’s character says the wrong thing as confidently as others stroll across the quad, extolling, for instance, the virtues of “dill pickle-flavored Corn Nuts” during what is meant to be a father-daughter heart-to-heart. Even the trans-Atlantic literary scene is a mystery to our bestselling lead. Confronted with Zadie Smith’s famous name, Greg professes to “absolutely love him. Or her. Or they.”
Like most of this decade’s campus productions, Rooster has much to say about the worried woke. A scene in which Greg reads aloud from his latest novel features undergraduate pushback of such plausibility — “Why do you hate women?” — that only a gloss of antisemitism seems missing. A midseason art-history seminar doesn’t devolve into a man-hating rant; it is that from the start. The problem with these setpieces is that Rooster plainly sees woke thinking as harmlessly eccentric, a human foible akin to Greg’s inability to walk up a hill without tripping. For those of us who know better, the dissonance is jarring. If a coordinated assault on Western civilization is going to be reconceived as comedy, it had better be funnier than this.
Consider, for example, the confusion attending the show’s treatment of its political nonconformists. Caught inadvertently “walk[ing] like an Egyptian,” Greg comes to the attention of a college disciplinary board on the prowl for cultural appropriation. He brings coffee to the hearing, and everything turns out just fine. Something similar occurs when smarmy administrator Vincent Riggs (Alan Ruck) declares an alleged ADHD sufferer to be “just lazy and a little dumb,” a judgment that would, in the world progressives have created, damage even a brilliant academic career. That Vincent’s colleagues greet his remark with little more than a sigh is in keeping with Rooster’s lighter-than-puff-pastry tone. It is also fundamentally dishonest. Whatever victories against thought-policing the Right has won in recent years, we haven’t yet battled back that far.
This is not to say that every campus-wokeness script must necessarily be dour. Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt did masterful work in that register just last year, but Netflix’s The Chair (2021) struck a different balance, having its goofy fun even as it cast a gimlet eye on the realities of American academic decline. What both of these productions had in common was an interest in human beings in all their complicated fullness, living in a world approximately like the one we know. Even The Office possessed as much in its finest moments. Rooster doesn’t.
HONEY, I SHRUNK WOMEN’S RIGHTS
Instead, the series treads clumsily the same ground that Apple TV’s Ted Lasso strode with style: a bubblegum lane in which all problems are trivial and ideological ratchets never turn. Veteran producer Bill Lawrence co-created both programs. I suppose this is what passes for feel-good television these days: treacly make-believe dressed up in adult garments. Decency porn for the hoi polloi. But, reader, I have been on and around college campuses for the last 28 years. Rooster’s vision of the university is a lie. Though one could overstate the threat, the fact remains that sane Americans have adversaries there. They are voracious. They will not be mollified with a smile.
For those who disagree, HBO’s latest has its share of pleasures. McGinley, so good on NBC’s Scrubs, shines as a college president beset by dissatisfactions on all sides. Comedian Rory Scovel earns a few laughs as a bumbling but well-meaning campus police officer. Fans of Carell’s familiar shtick will be wowed anew: The 63-year-old has learned nothing and still can’t follow the social plot. Yet, may I be forgiven for liking his dramatic roles best? One thinks of Hulu’s The Patient (2022), for instance, in which Carell played a therapist held prisoner by a deranged man. Say what you will about the melodramatic stakes. At least that fellow knew he had an enemy.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.