For co-creators Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, “Rooster” was always about their daughters.
It was one thing that the “Scrubs” collaborators had in common with comedy legend Steve Carell, whom Lawrence joked made the “mistake of talking to [them].”
“We would’ve done anything,” Lawrence told TheWrap. “He’s an icon, and he’s a guy that actually turned out to be the way that you would wish you would be in real life.”
Lawrence and Tarses hoped to center their next endeavor on a “blue-collar writer [and] man of the people” after spending time with Carl Hiaasen, who wrote “Bad Monkey” (which serves as the basis for the Apple TV show executive produced by the duo). But the heart of the HBO series was inspired by the trio’s trials and errors of navigating relationships with their newly minted adult daughters.
“All three of us have daughters that have just really entered into post-college adulthood,” Lawrence said, explaining that Carell’s daughter graduated from Northwestern, Tarses’ daughter graduated from college and is pursuing acting and Lawrence’s daughter is a touring musician.
“We all are still navigating what it means when, not only do you still want to be intrusive in their life and take care of them emotionally and keep them from getting hurt. But they no longer want that and they shouldn’t want that, and if someone held a gun to your head, you’d have to admit it was more about you trying to find what your place is than it actually is for them,” Lawrence continued.
The trio welcomed some collaboration from their daughters themselves, including Tarses’ daughter, Fiona, who made a joke that Lawrence found funny enough that he ended up building a character around her. “I resisted this … because I’m a bad father, and I didn’t want her to have this kind of leg up, but … she’s really good, and I’m very proud of her, and I’m very and it was nice of Bill to do that,” Tarses said.
“For me to witness that dynamic and how poorly Matt’s handling it has been one of the extra gifts of this show,” Lawrence joked.
That youthful perspective was needed to construct the intergenerational dynamic that unfolds when Carell’s Greg Russo heads to the college campus that his daughter works at. He quickly realizes he has a solid learning curve as he interacts with students in their late teens and early twenties, often stumbling with their more politically correct mindset. That storyline struck a cord with Lawrence, who joked, “Matt and I are dinosaurs — we’ve been writing comedy forever.”
“We have a writers’ room of young people and young coworkers, and I would often notice while I’m talking that things got very quiet and awkward — and there’s a weird feeling in the room — and I’ll look at Matt, and he’s giving me, with his eyes, the signal to stop talking or to ask what’s going on,” Lawrence admits. “Steve’s given us the gift of being able to do that comedy, because he can do it knowing, as an audience member, that there’s no ill intent behind it. He’s just a guy trying to navigate it and figure it out.”
While Lawrence joked that he, himself, enjoys pushing buttons, Tarses and Carell fall more in the boat of Greg, with Tarses noting, “The character is just curious and wants to understand … That doesn’t forgive everything, but it at least makes you a little more sympathetic to him when he steps in it.”
“It’s cool ground for comedy, because Matt and I will argue in the writers’ room,” Lawrence added. “It’s really interesting that the culture has allowed us to get into this weird tightrope — If you’re pushing back on what you’re allowed to [say] … if it’s funny, it wins. And if it’s not funny, you got to be careful. But it’s really, as writers, kind of a fun challenge.”
While working with Carell is a first-time experience for the team, Lawrence welcomed back several alumni from his previous shows for “Rooster,” including “Ted Lasso” star Phil Dunster and John C. McGinley, who has appeared in the original “Scrubs,” the “Scrubs” reboot currently rolling out on ABC as well as “Ground Floor,” which Lawrence co-created with Greg Malins.
Tarses admitted he was initially resistant to welcoming so many of his former stars back, but ultimately noted “every single one of them has exceeded my expectations.”
“Matt has been very generous and allowed me to bring people from my older shows on it, but he polices us, and they’re not allowed to repeat themselves,” Lawrence said. “If you meet an actor, actress, a writer, a director, a sound guy, an editor, someone that does great work that you would want to spend time with them … you’re insane to not keep working with them. I think it’s the greatest gift for me is to get to work with people I care about.”
Unlike “Scrubs” on the broadcast side, Lawrence noted the freedom of pitching series to streamers like HBO Max with simply a beginning, middle and end. “We definitely pitched them three-season story and know where it goes. But man, the cast is so big and so fun, I obviously wouldn’t want to do it more than three years if Matt wasn’t going to be still doing it,” Lawrence joked. “But if it was just me, I think I’d do it forever.”
“We would write this for a long time,” Tarses said. “We had a lot of fun. It’s rare to have this kind of synergy.”
“Rooster” premieres Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.
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