I Like 'Rooster' Because It's a Good Show

Steve Carell looks good and is funny and I enjoy hanging out with him

Katrina Marcinowski/HBO

First off, some housekeeping — and an apology. I missed last week’s post and didn’t say anything. Sorry about that. I was so sad about it that I didn’t want to talk about it. I’ve gotten so busy with work stuff and Dad Stuff that I just haven’t found enough time to devote to Dad Shows the past few weeks. And that’s going to continue for at least a few weeks more. So, as disappointing as this is for me and perhaps is for you, I can’t guarantee weekly posts for the next month or so. I can only promise to do them when I can. If that turns out to be weekly, I’ll be thrilled. More likely, posts will be intermittent. I may miss a week here and there, or send it out on a different day of the week than I usually do. I certainly won’t vanish from your inbox entirely, however. I hope that’s enough that you’ll stick with me.

Okay, on with the business.

I finally caught up with Rooster, HBO’s charming Dadcom from creators Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses and star Steve Carell. The main thing I’d like to emphasize about this show is that Steve Carell looks so good. He’s 63, and he looks 20 times better than he did 20 years ago. He’s been sipping that Ray Romano juice.

Carell is famously one of the top beneficiaries of hair surgery, which he ALLEGEDLY got between the first and second seasons of The Office, and whatever else he’s been doing since then is working just as well. All that Minions money pays for the best private chef and personal trainer available, surely, and if he’s gotten any other injections or whatever in his face, it’s very subtle and tasteful. So many guys in Hollywood have destroyed their faces with extreme and depressing surgery and so much filler they look like an eclair. It fills me with despair that they feel they have to do that to themselves. But not Steve Carell. He’s doing it right. He also has a reputation for being normal and well-adjusted, which probably has something to do with it. He doesn’t have whatever the thing is that drives someone who is famous for how they look to change their face into a different person’s.

All of that is running through my head while I’m watching Rooster, which ended its first season on Sunday (it’s been renewed for Season 2). I just like hanging out with Steve Rooster and all the other characters. Like many of Bill Lawrence’s shows — especially his recent ones Ted Lasso and Shrinking (and Bad Monkey, to a lesser extent)— Rooster is a pure hangout show, where the appeal is from how easygoing and pleasant the characters are and atmosphere is without being saccharine (Ted Lasso’s decline wasn’t his fault). I usually don’t like “nice” shows like this, but Rooster has just enough bite to keep me from choking on sweetness. The characters are funny and all very different from each other. They’re all friends, and the conflict between them never becomes dark or mean. Even Archie, Rooster’s daughter’s self-destructively selfish English husband who blew up his relationships with her and the grad student he got pregnant, feels redeemable. The show doesn’t hate him, even though it could. It has affection for all its characters — and cast them all super well.

Danielle Deadwyler is very versatile. I haven’t seen much of what she’s been in, to be honest, but I know her breakout role was playing Emmett Till’s mother, and that was surely a very different type of performance than her winningly effortless one as poetry professor Dylan Shephard, which is in turn a very different one than her guest starring role on The Bear last season as Ayo Edebiri’s cousin. She’s clearly someone who can do anything. I think she’ll be great in Ryan Coogler’s X-Files reboot opposite Himesh Patel. (They were both in Station Eleven, a very good limited series beloved by TV critics).

Everyone in the cast is great. Before this show, I was unfamiliar with Charly Clive, who plays Rooster’s daughter Katie, but I’m such a fan of her very fun performance. Her American accent is so good I didn’t even know she was British until I googled her. Connie Britton as Rooster’s ex-wife Beth has a nearly Dr. Spaceman level ratio of funny lines-to-screen time. She’s a recurring character who isn’t in that many scenes, but almost everything she says in those scenes is a joke. Lauren Tsai’s character Sunny, Archie’s conflicted girlfriend, wears a lot of tracksuits, and everything about the character is so specific that it feels like she must be based on a real person. And John C. McGinley as college president Walt Mann is hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking in the way he’s so uniquely good at.

The only thing I really don’t like about the show is the color correction. It started out mildly weird looking, and then got progressively greener throughout the season until I thought I was in the Matrix. The colors get so washed out that the actors’ faces are hard to see sometimes. What’s up with that? It’s like they don’t want us to see how good Steve Carell looks.