Steve Carell Returns To Comedy With Hilarious New HBO Show Rooster

15 years after he walked away from NBC legendary workplace sitcom The Office, Steve Carell is well and truly back in TV comedy with his new HBO show Rooster. The show sees him play an overprotective father whose daughter is going through a bad breakup. His character also just happens to be a famous best-selling author of smutty novels.

Although Carell’s best shows and movies tend to play to his comic strengths as an actor, over the past decade he’s branched out into more dramatic TV roles. In fact, besides the two-season Netflix flop Space Force, he hasn’t given a strictly comedic performance on the small screen since playing Michael Scott.

Carell has always been well-suited to acting in serious dramatic roles. His dark portrayal of depressive uncle Frank in Little Miss Sunshine was an early indication of his range as an actor. Still, we all miss him at his funniest, and so it’s great to see him return to out-and-out comedy in Rooster.

Rooster Will Feature Steve Carell's Funniest Role Since The Office

Much like Steve Carell’s best moments in The Office, we can already see from Rooster’s trailer that the actor’s inimitable comic timing is going to make this new HBO series into something genuinely hilarious. Out to protect his daughter after her university job is threatened by a breakup with another lecturer, Carell’s character ends up working on campus himself.

As if his overbearing presence in her daughter’s life weren’t bad enough, he’s also a popular novelist whose sexually explicit stories become cause for immense embarrassment to his daughter. At the same time, he becomes an unlikely hero among male students.

If this premise invokes memories of Michael Scott’s Threat Level Midnight, then Carell seems to indulge in recapturing this side of the office manager he played for seven years. His Rooster character is goofy, well-meaning, cringeworthy, and far from the most self-aware father figure. It feels like the Steve Carell of Dunder Mifflin Scranton is very much back in business.

Steve Carell Has Been More Successful In Dramatic Roles During The Last Decade

It would be overstating things to suggest Steve Carell hasn’t done TV comedy at all since The Office. Most of his small-screen roles over the past 15 years have had some comic aspects to them. However, besides Space Force, the shows he’s acted in have primarily been much darker stories, ranging from satires to psychological thrillers, and emotionally charged dramas.

The Morning Show, The Patient, The Four Seasons, and Mountainhead, have each had varying levels of success, but they’ve all had one thing in common. These series feature Steve Carell playing a part that’s more-or-less serious. He was always considered an actor capable of doing more dramatic roles. Well, now he’s gone and done them.

What To Expect From Rooster On HBO

Alongside Carell, Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster stars in Rooster, which is the brainchild of the soccer sitcom’s co-creator, Bill Lawrence. Dunster plays the partner of the protagonist’s daughter in the show, who cheats on her with a grad student at the university where they both work. As Rooster’s trailer illustrates, Dunster and Carell’s characters clearly aren’t going to get along.

However, most of the comedy in the show will come from how embarrassing it is for Carell’s character to be joining his daughter at her workplace, in order to teach classes about his wildly popular but incredibly smutty novels. It remains to be seen exactly how well Rooster’s comedy will land in general, but the initial signs are certainly promising.