‘Rooster’ Review: Steve Carell Goes Back to School in a Breezy Campus Comedy (HBO Max)

Positioned as the flagship of HBO’s comedy revamp — or at least that was the idea before the ongoing corporate reshuffling involving Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global — Rooster is a classic campus comedy. The kind where professors, students, exes, administrators and parents constantly collide while juggling personal meltdowns and professional crises inside an increasingly pressure-cooked university environment.

But realism isn’t really the point here.

Despite being set at an American college, Rooster — starring Steve Carell — has little interest in becoming a sharp portrait of higher education in 2026. When politically charged issues pop up — complaints, suspicions, awkward misunderstandings that could spiral into career-ending disasters — they’re mostly treated as setups for punchlines. The real engine of the series is something else entirely: this is, at heart, a family comedy about what happens when a father and daughter find themselves sharing the same campus.

Carell plays Greg Russo, a mildly successful commercial novelist clearly modeled after Carl Hiaasen. Greg writes pulpy detective fiction starring a private eye known as “Rooster” — essentially a braver, more confident alter ego of himself. In reality, Greg is anxious, timid and painfully aware that he’s not exactly a darling of the literary establishment. He’s invited to the fictional Ludlow University to give a talk, and that visit ends up changing everything.

His daughter Katie (Charly Clive) teaches there. Recently separated from her husband Archie (Phil Dunster) after discovering he was having an affair with a student named Sunny (Lauren Tsai), Katie is unraveling. Her messy fallout with Archie is causing tension in the department, and her eccentric but oddly lovable chair (a scene-stealing John C. McGinley) is considering firing her. However, he also happens to be a diehard fan of Greg’s novels. So he makes Greg an offer he can’t refuse: stay on campus as a guest lecturer for a semester, and Katie keeps her job.

That setup locks father and daughter into an uncomfortable cohabitation within the same professional ecosystem. Surrounding them is a gallery of sitcom-ready personalities: another professor (Danielle Deadwyler), a dean played by Alan Ruck (forever associated with Succession), Greg’s ex-wife (Connie Britton), an overworked secretary (Annie Mumolo), and a group of students who connect with Greg in ways that may not be strictly academic.

The show piles on the expected ingredients: romantic entanglements, ego clashes, petty rivalries, hookups, professional jealousy, and more than a few farcical escalations. It rarely takes itself too seriously, and it consistently prioritizes humor over psychological excavation. At least for now, the characters function more as comic engines than as vessels for deeper introspection.

Co-created by Bill Lawrence (of Scrubs and Ted Lasso fame), Rooster fits comfortably into that modern dramedy lane where middle-aged men are forced to confront the emotional messes they’ve long postponed dealing with. Like Lawrence’s other shows — including Shrinking — it mixes sentiment with wit. The difference is that Rooster rarely allows the drama to overpower the joke.

Even potentially serious storylines — marital collapse, professional misconduct accusations, houses accidentally set on fire — remain filtered through a comedic lens. The show’s philosophy seems to be: when in doubt, go for the laugh. That sometimes leads to an overreliance on broad physical comedy — pratfalls, cringe-heavy awkwardness, and slapstick bits that can feel a touch lightweight.

Still, that commitment to breezy storytelling is part of its charm. Rooster presents a university that, while chaotic, isn’t a nonstop ideological war zone. It may come off as slightly naive, maybe even out of step with the harsher realities of contemporary campus life. But in a media landscape crowded with prestige angst, a weekly half-hour of warmth and low-stakes absurdity feels not just pleasant — but oddly refreshing.