Steve Carell’s Rooster marks his return to television on HBO

Television loves a comeback, audiences love a familiar face and HBO loves prestige wrapped in comfort. Rooster, Steve Carell’s return to TV, is where those three interests shake hands and agree to be emotionally available.

Bill Lawrence teams up with Steve Carell for Rooster

On Rooster, Steve Carell plays Greg Russo, a bestselling novelist who arrives on a college campus to support his daughter, a professor whose personal and professional life has just imploded. What’s meant to be a brief rescue visit turns into a longer stay, and before long, his character is navigating students, academic politics, and the unsettling experience of being a middle-aged man dropped into a Gen-Z ecosystem.

The Ted Lasso and Shrinking creator, Bill Lawrence co-developed the series so expect jokes, but also heart-to-hearts, personal growth arcs, sincerity.

Steve, meanwhile, is playing the earnest outsider who wants to do the right thing but keeps stepping into social quicksand. On campus, students latch onto him as “Rooster,” the hyper-masculine hero from his novels, forcing Greg to confront the gap between the myth he created and the man he actually is.

That gap is the show’s real engine. Campus comedies traditionally focus on youth discovering identity. Rooster flips the lens to a man confronting relevance, aging, and the quiet panic of realizing the cultural conversation has moved on without him. In a media landscape obsessed with generational divides, the premise feels less like a sitcom device and more like a mirror. The supporting cast includes Connie Britton, Phil Dunster and Danielle Deadwyler.

Whether Rooster breaks new ground is an open question. The formula—kindness, growth, found family, emotional competence—has worked extremely well for Lawrence. But familiarity is also the point. 

If the show works, it won’t be because Steve Carell is funny, that’s a given. It will be because Rooster understands the modern anxiety beneath the laughs: the fear of becoming outdated in a world that refreshes itself every six months.

In other words, it’s a campus comedy about the scariest subject on television right now—middle age trying to keep up. And if Steve Carell leans into the discomfort, the series might find its sweet spot exactly where prestige TV now lives: somewhere between therapy session and punchline.

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