4 hours ago
8
Humankind, as TS Eliot’s bird said in Burnt Norton , cannot bear too much reality. That feels especially salient now, when we have more reality arriving in a day than we used to have to process in a year.
At the same time, unless you go the whole high-fantasy hog and offer 100% escapism via immersion in a completely alternative world, it is becoming trickier for your audiences to believe in you at all. Programmes set in the real world have to acknowledge the new way of it. Pure, frothy comedy just became that much harder to pull off – and it was never easy. But walking the line between too much reality and not enough is almost as difficult.
Enter Steve Carell, the master of the everyman figure we can root for, hope for, relate to and believe in. Rooster, a new 10-part dramedy (I hate this word, but “light drama” and “heavy comedy” are worse), is built around his matchless talent for calibrating cringe, making us laugh and, when he wants to, almost weep while wildly whipping our heads from side to side, wondering quite how that crept up on us.
Carell plays a successful author of genre fiction, Greg Russo, who is invited to give a talk to the English students at the college where his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), teaches. He is fervently welcomed by the college president, Walter Mann (John C McGinley, playing 50% his Scrubs character Dr Cox and 50% gossipy flake, which works really well). Walter is a big fan of Greg’s writing – or at least a big fan of someone people have heard of coming to add a bit of the commercially useful stardust without which no modern educational establishment can survive. Walter also likes to be as naked as possible, so that people will think: “Most college presidents are bookish shut-ins, but this guy is jacked!”
(I don’t know if you’ve seen the exercise video put out by two similarly delusional men who don’t have the excuse of a comedy script, but if you have a minute and a large drink to hand, you can Google “Robert F Kennedy and Kid Rock” and wonder anew at our present moment.)
The meat of Rooster, dark and light, lies in Greg’s relationship with Katie. She is dealing with the affair her husband, Archie (Ted Lasso’s Jamie Tartt, miscast here as a bumbling academic), had with one of his students. He tells Greg that he already regrets it; Greg, who has been practising the phrase, tells him that, if he wants to make things right, he had better “man the fuck up”. “You really nailed it that time,” Archie notes. “I don’t need your approval,” says Greg. “But thank you.”
Although the story is flecked with minor scenes and characters we’ve seen before (the hostile receptionist with the weird name, the barista with an untold story), the father-daughter dynamic feels tender and true. There is a lovely and unexpected moment after a comic exchange between the pair about why Katie’s parents broke up (“She cheated on you.” “Oh, good, you’re in the loop”), Greg advising her when speaking to Archie for the first time to “be kind”, so that she won’t say anything she will regret. It invokes his store of hard-won wisdom and all the weirdness of parenting – how your job remains to protect your child over the longest term possible, however wild or unsupportive it makes you look at the time.
There is also a slow-growing, equally sweet, funny and complex relationship between Greg and the poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler, in the kind of part that is usually woefully underwritten, but here is given loving care and to which she adds even more). It includes a scene of such perfectly genuine awkwardness on her doorstep after their first evening out as friends that I am torn between longing to watch it repeatedly for its artistry and banishing it from my mind for its remorseless agony.
Like the recent Vladimir and last year’s The Four Seasons (also co-starring Carell), this is television for grownups. Younger viewers will roll their eyes at the lazier jokes about the generational divide (usually involving students’ hypersensitivities and mental health diagnoses) and it would indeed have been better if these could have been more focused. On the other hand, theirs is the world, so let us have these 10 half-hours, eh? Carell may not be the hero you need, but he is ours.
