Showrunner Bill Lawrence Breaks Down “Rooster,” Steve Carell’s Charm, and the Art of the Perfect Pilot
In a welcome return to comedy, years after famously playing clueless manager Michael Scott in The Office, Steve Carell can now be seen slipping off roofs, getting drunk, talking smack in sauna rooms, and being insulted by liberal arts students in Rooster. Filmed in Los Angeles, Rooster (Sundays on HBO), co-created by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, casts Carell in the role of action-adventure novelist Greg Russo, who becomes writer-in-residence at the East Coast college where his daughter (Charly Clive) teaches. Lawrence, one of TV’s most prolific showrunners, also juggles Shrinking, the Scrubs revival, Ted Lasso, and Bad Monkey, along with six greenlit productions currently in the works.
“I just love the world-building aspect of television,” Lawrence tells The Credits. “I love dropping the audience into a world that feels new. It can be familiar, it can be nostalgic, it can be futuristic, but just being able to fill out the edges and have it feel authentic and lived in – that kind of stuff always makes me happy.”
During a visit to New York, Lawrence unpacks Rooster inspirations, including the “aw-shucks” Florida novelist Carl Hiaasen, and shares his fondness for the big star who’s actually nice off-camera.
Congratulations on Rooster. The show is so funny, clever, and charming.
Oh, thanks, man.
I read somewhere that Steve Carell called Rooster one of the best pilot episode scripts he’s ever read. That must have been gratifying for you?
It was amazing. This show kind of started with the fact that Matt and I just desperately wanted to work with Steve.
Did you know Steve personally before casting him in Rooster?
No. I’d met him here and there, but generally speaking, you can’t find a comedy writer who doesn’t fantasize about Steve Carell saying stuff that they wrote. When Matt and I decided to live in this world of college and have someone kind of playing the author Carl Hiaasen, Steve was just that guy.
Some famous people can allegedly be jerks when the cameras aren’t rolling. What’s Steve Carell like offstage?
He’s nice in real life. To have someone you admire professionally so much as an artist turn out to be the exact way you’d hope they would be – that was an added bonus.
Your shows always feature likable performers, going back to Spin City with Michael J. Fox, Ted Lasso with Jason Sudeikis, Jason Segel in Shrinking, and now Steve Carell in Rooster. No matter what kind of trouble his Greg Russo character gets into, Carell keeps the audience on his side.
Steve radiates goodwill, so that buys you the ability to have his character stumble into many situations that become part of the fun for us comedically.
Given your track record and current workload, you obviously know how to craft a compelling pilot script. Boiling it down, what do you see as the key ingredients?
Part of it is that you have to deliver a lot of exposition and get to know the characters. And with Rooster, because Steve’s such a generous actor, he wanted a true ensemble show. Then it really became about making sure people got to know a myriad of characters who would all have their own arcs and stories.
So even though all roads in Rooster ultimately lead to Steve Carell’s Greg, you have to make sure each of those roads—those characters—is interesting in their own right?
Yeah. I hope people come out of the first few episodes going, “I wonder where the former married couple, played by Charly Clive and Phil Dunster, I wonder where that road ends? I wonder whether Danielle Deadwyler’s character [poetry professor Dylan] can get a voice at the school and be heard the way she wants? I wonder how it goes for that affable kid student who’s not sure he even belongs at the school?”
Tommy – he’s great.
That kid, Maximo [Salas], who plays Tommy, is so good that we ended up writing more for him just to see how he led his life. I think these are all kinds of interesting arcs. Even the secondary characters like Annie Mumolo, who plays the assistant, or Robby Hoffman, the roommate, and Rory Scovel, the cop – they all have their own lives. In the old network television days, these “side characters” just came in to deliver exposition and be kind of rich comedically. But being dropped into a world like Rooster, I want it to be funny, but I also want it to have some heart.
You mention Florida novelist Carl Hiaasen as the inspiration for Steve Carell’s character. You got to know Hiaasen while adapting his “Bad Monkey” book as the basis for your Vince Vaughn series?
Yeah. Carl’s this kind of quintessential “aw shucks” everyman who’s kind of awkwardly trying to find his way. When we met, I thought, “Wow, it’d be fun to [have Steve] play a guy like him who’s accomplished so much but is still maybe not completely sure what his life should look like.” College is the place you go to kind of reinvent yourself and decide who you’re gonna be for the rest of your life, which the students and the young people are doing. But who’s to say a guy in his late 50s, like Greg, can’t do it too?
Speaking of the college experience, you attended William & Mary, but you also have a personal connection to the fancy Sarah Lawrence College in New York, right?
Sarah Lawrence is my great-great-grandma. In real life, I’m William Van Duzer Lawrence the fourth, and the main admissions building [at Sarah Lawrence College] is the original William Lawrence’s home. There’s a big painting of a guy that looks exactly like me, except he’s balding and has mutton chops. I didn’t have the courage to go [to school] there because I couldn’t imagine being in the spotlight. And not only am I tied to a small East Coast liberal arts institution, but Matt Tarses – his whole family went to Williams [College] in Massachusetts. Steve went to a small college as well, where he played hockey. So that was a big influence.
In Shrinking, the dad has issues with his daughter. On Rooster, the dad has issues with his daughter. Are we seeing a pattern there?
You know what? I write about stuff that I know. The conflict in Shrinking between Jimmy and his teen daughter resulted, first and foremost, from the grief of his wife’s death, so it’s a lot about grief and forgiveness, but do I write relationships that are familiar to me? Yeah. Look at Liz and Derek in Shrinking. That feels very familiar to me in my own marriage and not just ’cause my wife [Christa Miller] is playing Liz.
In the case of Rooster, the heart of the story centers on this contentious father-daughter relationship.
Well, Rooster is more personal because my daughter’s out in the world. She’s a successful singer, off in Europe performing now, and I want to be wherever she is, protect her from bad things, and take care of her. And not only does she not want that, but she shouldn’t want it. Steve, Matt, and I shared some common ground in that we all have daughters about the same age – mine’s 25, Steve’s just graduated from college, and Matt’s daughter also graduated from college. We’re all trying to navigate what our lives are supposed to look like while still wanting to be intrusively involved in our daughters’ lives, even though they don’t really need us that way anymore.
Rooster is shot in California, and so is Shrinking. You like making shows in and around L.A.?
It matters to me so much. At the [Rooster] premiere, a few of us celebrated having worked together on Spin City – – Alan Ruck and Connie Britton were in that show, and Rooster‘s Cabot McMullen was the production designer. We’ve all worked together for, like, 31 years now. And that shorthand makes it a little easier to put on shows because you have so many people watching your back.
Getting to work with people you’ve come to know over the years…
It’s selfish. Wanting to be in California working with the same craftspeople and camera department, the same grips and wardrobe, the same production designer – that safety net of people is a gift for our company. We make Shrinking in L.A. and shoot the exteriors in and around Pasadena and Altadena, which we love and support. Rooster is a New England college show, but we shot it here, at College of Pacifica [in Stockton], Occidental College, and USC [in Los Angeles]. We cribbed off their campuses and made it look like fall and winter. I’m doing my darndest to keep production in L.A. because it’s still the hub of the industry for me.
Featured image: Steve Carell, Bill Lawrence, and Danielle Deadwyler on the set of “Rooster.” Courtesy HBO
