By Kilian Melloy

When Bill Lawrence, Matt Tarses, and Steve Carell sat down to create a television show, they hit on a theme that Generation X may be grappling with just now. “We are all right now wrestling with what it means to be the parent of a young woman who has entered into adulthood and maybe does not want you in their life as much as you would choose to be,” Lawrence explains during a virtual press conference for Rooster, the trio’s new HBO comedy that premiered this past weekend.

The recognition that a father’s desire to stay close to his daughter is “not really for them, it’s for you” became the emotional foundation for a show that’s ostensibly about a middle-aged novelist teaching at his daughter’s college. That setting allows for a second generational level of storytelling, drawing in a cast of recurring characters as the students that father and daughter both attempt to relate to even as they serve as instructors and mentors. Beer pong thus crops up cheek-by-jowl with the emotional wreckage of adult relationships gone wrong, post-graduation career worries coexist with administrative intrigue, and hot-button questions of what speech is allowed versus what will get a person canceled, even in a setting ostensibly dedicated to vigorous intellectual inquiry, often take the spotlight… though in satirically exaggerated terms, as when a fleeting moment referencing “Walk Like an Egyptian” prompts a faculty meeting with potential disciplinary consequences. In other words, this is a workplace/family comedy that relies on its characters’ fundamental incompetencies and insecurities but still harbors dramatic ambitions. What could be more relatable?

Rooster also uses its premise as a delivery system for another of life’s painful universals. “On some level it’s about loneliness,” Tarses offers. That loneliness radiates through every character in the ensemble: Carell’s Greg Russo, a novelist whose Rooster book series stars a cartoonishly macho protagonist that’s as much a fantasy projection of Greg’s as a sop for his hungry readership; Charly Clive’s Katie, Greg’s art historian daughter who is navigating the emotional rollercoaster of a marriage upended by infidelity but kept uneasily alive by an avid passion; Phil Dunster’s Archie, the husband whose ongoing relationship with a student complicates things even more; Lauren Tsai’s Sunny, the emotionally conflicted student in question; Danielle Deadwyler’s Dylan, a professor with her own complicated history; Maximo Salas’ Tommy, a townie-turned-gownie who feels only barely accepted among his circle of fellow students; and John C. McGinley’s Walter, the eccentric college president who presses Greg into accepting a stint as the college’s writer in residence, to Katie’s horror.

Carell, serving as both star and executive producer, understood the assignment immediately. “I can draw from that because I have experience,” he says of playing a father struggling with his adult daughter. “It’s not exactly my relationship with my daughter,” he adds. For Lawrence and Tarses, who’ve collaborated before on Bad Monkey and worked together on Scrubs, the father-daughter dynamic offered a way into comedy that felt urgent and specific. Lawrence worked with author Carl Hiaasen on Bad Monkey, and Carell’s Greg is “loosely based on Carl” — something Hiaasen apparently didn’t yet know at the time of panel.

“We’re saying this now, so someone can tell Carl for us,” Lawrence jokes. Tarses confirms: “Yeah, he does not know this, though.”

But if Greg is inspired by Hiaasen, the show’s most distinctive visual motif — characters repeatedly dunking themselves in ice baths and subjecting themselves to sauna torture — comes from an even more direct source: John C. McGinley’s actual life. Lawrence and McGinley go back to 2001, when McGinley had to prove himself for the role of Dr. Cox on Scrubs, despite the script literally describing the character as “a John McGinley type.” “Bill made me audition five times,” McGinley notes with lingering incredulity.

“You weren’t as comfortable playing a John McGinley type back then,” Lawrence counters. “We just had to get through it.”

For British actor Charly Clive, the British actress playing Katie, the opportunity to play Carrell’s onscreen daughter arrived in the guise of an email simply labeled “Untitled Steve Carell Project.”

“I was like, oh, I would love to be in ‘Untitled Steve Carell Project’,” she recalls. Her agent was skeptical: “‘Do you want to tape for this?’” Clive recalls her agent asking. “‘You’re never gonna get it. It’s this big American thing, and it’s gonna be in Hollywood.’” But Clive had nothing to lose. “The stakes were very low because I was like, ‘Well, no one’s gonna watch this tape,’ and so I had loads of fun with it.”

When Clive met Carell for the first table read, the chemistry was immediate. “I just knew instantly, on Zoom, that she was the one to play my daughter,” Carell says. “She was so warm and such a good actor and wanted to explore and [was] open to anything.”

Lauren Tsai entered a pool of “heavyweights” as a relatively young actress. Sunny, she explains, is an outsider who hides behind hyper-intellectualizing everything, “which is very terrifying” when you’re playing someone trying to be funny but whose humor no one gets. “I don’t even know if it’s funny, so with these people, too, I feel like I could just peel off the edge and, like, back into the ether,” Tsai reflects.

But the welcoming environment made the risk-taking possible. Tsai, who at 18 took a gap year to move to Tokyo instead of attending college on the East Coast — “a gap year which has now become a gap life” — found the collegiate setting both foreign and fulfilling. “I feel like I really found a sense of community and family amongst the cast when we were shooting,” she says.

Danielle Deadwyler, known primarily for devastating dramatic work, jumped at the chance to “rejuvenate my nervous system after years of judgery and tears.” Her audition wasn’t really an audition; it was a workshop with Carell. “Steve was like, ‘You want to do it again? We can do it again,’” Deadwyler recounts. “We were diving. We were working it out. It was really, really fun… It’s like being [in] a theater room at the end of day — you just want to be in the room; you just want to be doing the work.”

Phil Dunster, who plays the self-obsessed, yet charismatic, Archie, has been “referenced to be an asshole quite a lot in the last couple of days” during press, the actor jokes. “So, thanks again, Bill, for casting me as that guy.” But Archie isn’t a simple villain. By the end of the pilot, one journalist notes, the audience finds some sympathy for him, too. It’s a delicate tonal balance, and Lawrence knew he needed a specific skill set. “Matt and I really desperately wanted to cast somebody that can do reprehensible things, and at the end you still find yourself unwillingly going, ‘Aw, that guy,’” Lawrence says. “That’s a skill set for an actor or actress that is rare, and Phil has it.”

Dunster, modestly suggests the writing gives him room to explore complexity rather than playing “just a bit of a nincompoop,” but Lawrence insists, “It’s very hard to play an empathetic antagonist,” something Dunster accomplishes with élan as well as with a sculpted physique the show finds opportunities to show off. Case in point: A wildly comedic fight scene between Dunster and Carell, with Dunster in his boxers. That scene required a different kind of preparation. “I knew I’d be in my boxers in it, so it was mostly a lot of squats,” the actor jokes.

When asked about balancing the show’s humor with its “undercurrent of sadness and ennui and isolation,” Lawrence jumps in to ensure that credit is given where it’s due. “No one here’s gonna say props about themselves,” he notes, “so I’m just gonna say one sentence: We talk about tone a lot in the writers’ room, and that tonal tightrope, to be able to switch from broad to silly comedy, to moments of emotional depth and pathos, you have to find actors and actresses that can pull that off, or the show’s a disaster and it doesn’t work.”

Offering a specific example, he adds, “We can write a scene that says Katie is telling her dad why she has mixed feelings about him teaching at this college, and the action line just says, ‘And Steve Carell chews corn nuts.’ Then we get to sit back and take credit for a scene that has [a] dramatic relationship undercurrent, and I could watch Steve Carell chew corn nuts for an hour.”

Clive chips in with, “That was one of the best days of my life.”

Deadwyler offers her own framework for understanding the balance: “Sadness is like a hum, right? It’s not something that’s immediately witness-able or something that you can articulate. It’s just there. I think all humans have this thing that’s driving in them.” The skill, she contends, is layering comedy on top of that hum while maintaining the “wavelength of ‘I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.’”

Lawrence returns to Tarses’s loneliness observation. “You can go through their characters and underneath it all, whether they overtly say it or whether they’re playing an undercurrent of it, it’s lonely out there right now,” he offers. “It’s a chaotic world and watching them all play it to different degrees has been amazing.”

Carell insists he doesn’t actively seek out new types of characters to play. Rather, he says, “It’s mostly a matter of people that I would like to work with and creators that I’d like to work with. I was a huge fan of Bill and Matt, and when they called me, I thought, ‘Well, this could be something really special.’”

Carrell also stresses that Greg isn’t a Walter Mitty schlub fantasizing about being his fictional hero, Rooster — even if the students who look up to him take to calling him by that moniker. “I didn’t want him to be some sort of schlub who lacks everything that Rooster has,” Carrell says. “He’s a fairly confident guy. He’s not a cartoon. A woman marries him who is an incredibly competent force of nature, so there has to be something about him that would draw her to that.” (That woman, Beth, also divorced Greg five years earlier, another point around which father and daughter can bond, however awkwardly. Delightfully, Connie Britton plays Beth.) The interest, Carrell contends, lies in “all different little shades of who this person is, maybe wants to become, and maybe ultimately doesn’t want exactly what he thinks he wants.”

Comparisons to The Office are inevitable, and Carrell leans into them. The ensemble feel of Rooster “reminds me of my experience on The Office in terms of that was a cast that no component was more important any other,” he explains. “We were an ensemble, and we shared. That includes cast, crew, writers, producers, everybody. We just wanted it to be good.”

The chemistry extended beyond the principal cast to what Lawrence calls “the secondary cast of this show all steal scenes and have arcs of their own” — Annie Mumolo, who plays the assistant to McGinley’s college president, and who has eyes for Carrell’s Greg; Rory Scovel, who plays a campus police officer with whom Greg manages to have repeated uncomfortable interactions; Robby Hoffman, who plays Sunny’s sarcastic roommate, Mo; and Maximo’s bright-eyed Tommy, who forges an unexpected bond with Greg. They are collectively described casting director Allison Jones’s “finds and discoveries.”

Lawrence and Tarses have built a show in which every character has their own journey, their own loneliness, their own desperate attempts to connect. The college setting — filmed on multiple campuses in Massachusetts — provides what Deadwyler calls “a place where conversation is encouraged, conflict is encouraged. This is a place for all kinds of speech to occur.”

On television, at least.

Rooster airs Sunday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.

Watch the trailer to Rooster: