HBO's Rooster — Steve Carell Is Still Funny as Hell
HBO’s Rooster with Steve Carell
Spoiler Alert — the following contains spoilers for HBO's Rooster Season 1.
I just binged through HBO's Rooster starring Steve Carell, and when I finished I turned to my wife and said exactly that — he's still funny as hell.
Mentioning Rooster immediately led us to talking about Get Smart, one of my favourite movie, and one of Steve Carell's best performances. My wife and I started going through the scenes: the toilet scene with the Russian gangsters, the moment he accidentally shoots himself with darts inside the airplane washroom, and my personal favourite — the cone of silence scene. All of them are built on Steve Carell's signature slapstick delivery, and every single one lands because of how distinctly he performs it.
At the end of the conversation I told my wife that Steve Carell is the Western equivalent of Stephen Chow from Hong Kong — actors who have mastered a specific brand of physical and verbal comedy that feels genuinely rare in today's entertainment landscape. More on that at the end.
Steve Carell in the Show
Steve Carell does slapstick action comedy exceptionally well. There's a scene in Rooster where his character accidentally trips over a bag during a lecture and instinctively braces himself by grabbing onto someone, but on the wrong body part. It's genuinely funny in a way that simply wouldn't land with a different actor in the role.
But what he does best — and this is harder to describe — is say exactly what someone might be privately thinking, delivers it completely unfiltered, and then in the final beat of the sentence you can see the moment the character realizes they've already said the wrong thing out loud. It's not straightforward slapstick. It's a specific kind of comedy that requires precise timing, a distinctive voice and a natural instinct for the exact moment to land the look.
It's a lost art. I genuinely cannot think of a current comedic actor who does this with the same consistency. Maybe Awkwafina gets close in certain moments. Jason Segel has some of it. But nobody does it quite like Carell.
In Rooster, he deploys this throughout — and the result is that you're watching two things simultaneously. You're aware you're watching Steve Carell. And you're also completely invested in Greg, nicknamed Rooster. Carell earns both. He moves between humour and genuine emotion — as a father, an ex-husband, a professor, a friend — sometimes within a single scene, and it never feels forced.
The Show Built Its Cast Exceptionally Well
The main cast isn't large and isn't particularly famous by mainstream standards. The most recognizable face — at least for me — is Phil Dunster from Ted Lasso. I actually think this was a deliberate and smart casting choice. Without the weight of recognizable names, each character gets the space to be fully developed on their own terms rather than through the lens of where audiences know them from. That said — it was genuinely strange watching Phil Dunster play someone not Jamie Tartt 😂
Where the show really excels is in its supporting characters.
Mo — the roommate of one of the main characters — consistently delivers sharp, witty comebacks that land every time. Zoey and Sophia are both strong, proactive feminist characters but portrayed with enough distinction that the show avoids making the concept one-dimensional. And then there's Eva — an East Asian female business major, which would usually be portrayed as the studious, by-the-book type. The show subverts that expectation entirely. She smokes in her dorm room, holds the dominant position in her relationship with another character — who, wonderfully, turns out to be a gifted poet — and generally refuses to be the character you assumed she was going to be.
The other main characters are equally well developed — there's genuinely too much to cover properly here. The show earned its ensemble.
Final Thought
HBO shows typically announce themselves immediately — dark, gritty, intense. Rooster feels nothing like that. It's the kind of warm, character-driven comedy you'd expect from Apple TV or Disney+, which makes its existence on HBO genuinely surprising. And genuinely refreshing. It is the Golden Age of TV afterall.
Coming back to the Stephen Chow comparison — there's something both nostalgic and reassuring about watching an actor continue to be completely and distinctly themselves while inhabiting new characters in new projects. Stephen Chow built an entire era of Hong Kong comedy on exactly that kind of committed, specific comedic identity. Steve Carell has done the same thing in a completely different cultural context. Rooster is the latest proof.
And if Stephen Chow ever decides to make another film? That would be next level. Consider this my public request 😂
