All of the Things That Annoy Me About "Rooster" -- And Why I Like It Anyway
My academic take on a show set in a college.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has long been wary of depictions of academic life in television and film.1 As I have lamented previously, it is a given in these shows and films that there will always be a male professor character who sleeps with a student. I suppose in the post-#MeToo era that plot can be varied to “male professor creeps on student” but that’s not much of an improvement. Some of these shows have been pretty good, like The Chair, but the truth is that most of them have been disappointing.
So when I saw the trailer for HBO Max’s Rooster, I felt a familiar sense of trepidation:
Rooster stars Steve Carell as Greg Russo, a successful Carl Hiassen-kind of author who never attended college. He agrees to serve as writer-in-residence at leafy Ludlow College, however, so he can help out his daughter Katie (played by Charly Clive), an art history prof at Ludlow in the throes of a crisis because her stupid git of a husband — a vainglorious Russian history professor named Archie (played by Phil Dunster) has gone and has an affair with grad student Sunny (played by Lauren Tsai), who turns out to be pregnant. Complications ensue.
So, yeah, a professor sleeps with a student — not a great start! Still, Steve Carell is usually fun to watch. And this show is a creation of Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Ted Lasso, the criminally underrated Bad Monkey) and his frequent co-creator Matt Tarses, who — fun fact — was a college classmate of mine back in the day at the best leafy liberal arts college in the world.
So I started watching.
Rooster has received middling reviews but great ratings — and I think I understand both responses. Here is a short list of Comic Book Guy questions I had while watching Rooster:
Is Ludlow a college or a university? The show is shot like it’s a prototypical liberal arts college but there is apparently also a business school and a biotech graduate program?! The show really needs to make up its mind here!
What, exactly, is the academic specialty of college president Walt Mann (played by a mostly shirtless John C. McGinley2)? It seems like he’s an expert on Teddy Roosevelt but then Sunny, the biotechnology student, seeks him out as a mentor — which doesn’t make a ton of sense?
Speaking of Walt, he has the most free time of any college administrator I have ever met. In 2026 no college president has that much unstructured time for coffee walks and plunge pools is what I’m saying here.
Do the showrunners understand how the tenure track works? In one episode Katie talks about a “fast track” for tenure, like becoming tenure track is a choice. It was very confusing.
For someone who is such a successful author, when does Greg actually write anything? We never see him writing!
So I can’t say that the show really captured college in 2026 all that accurately. Which is a point the AV Club’s Noel Murray also noted, “does [the] show have anything fresh or insightful to say about college life in 2026? Goodness no. Did we expect them to? Television has long been terrible at depicting what happens in schools—and in college in particular.”
And yet…. Rooster has charms that kept me coming back for more:
The show has a catchy theme song! “I Played the Fool” by Michael Stipe and Andrew Watt is a solid earworm. It perfectly captures Rooster’s vibe, and I never skipped the opening credits because I wanted to listen to it.
The cast is great. Carell is his usual stellar, awkward self. Connie Britton is fabulous as his successful and selfish ex-wife. Phil Dunster — who played Jamie Tartt in Ted Lasso — manages to breathe life into the insufferable cad of Archie. And Annie Mumolo, who plays Walt’s executive assistant Christle, steals every scene she is in.
The wokeness on college campuses is played for gentle laughs. I laughed every time Greg said something mildly inappropriate, which was followed by a smash cut to him apologizing to a code of conduct committee. It was an easy laugh — and no college committee works that fast — but a laugh is a laugh…
There’s a moment in the second episode when Walt explains to his friend Dylan (played by Danielle Deadwyler) why being the college president is so tough: “It just feels like this is my whole job now. People come and ask me for things that they really care about, I have to say no, and then they hold it against me.” As a lower-level administrator, let me just say that line cut to the bone.
The show has poetry professor Dylan actually want to become the Dean of Faculty. As someone who is wary of college administration I nonetheless welcomed the portrayal of a professor who decides that she possesses administrative ambitions and pursues them.
The supportive relationship between Sunny and her grad school roommate Mo (played by Robby Hoffman) was awfully nice to see.
In the season finale, after Greg tells his student Tommy (played by Maximo Salas) that he liked his chapter, there is a shot of Tommy — who has had a rough semester — looking happy, warm in the glow of Greg’s praise. Generating and then seeing those reactions is one of the best things about being a professor.
Rooster has already been renewed for a second season — and I’ll keep watching it. Because even if it doesn’t get everything right about working at a college in 2026, it gets some things right — and I can hope that it’s sophomore effort will improve upon its freshman entry.
Novels are a completely different thing. I just finished R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, for example, and although that book’s ending was way too pat it might be the best depiction of the highs and horrors of graduate school that I have ever read.
CORRECTION: The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World originally said that John C. Reilly played the college president. The staff regrets the error but would totally watch a show in which Reilly played that kind of part.
There’s also a scene where Archie is sitting at his laptop, working on his book, hitting himself in the head with frustration, that captures the experience of academic writing perfectly. I loved that scene so much that I forgave many of the show’s other sins.
Thank you for writing this! I've watched 3 episodes and am having a hard time sticking with it. It's not that campus PC politics aren't ripe for satire, but this feels pretty ham-handed most of the time. Carrell accidentally harasses one student and accidentally assaults another in the same class? And wtf with a grad student bullying the college president into being her advisor? Also, there's no way an author this prolific hasn't spoken in front of college students before -- he seems utterly mystified by them. I also compare it unfavorably to The Chair.