Entertainment
From ‘Ted Lasso’ to ‘Shrinking,’ Bill Lawrence Maps Out His Ultimate TV Multiverse
Summary
- Perri Nemiroff talks with Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses for HBO Max’s Rooster.
- The co-writers discuss getting Steve Carell on board and finding the perfect ensemble cast for their father-daughter comedy.
- They also share their favorite crossover ideas with Rooster, Scrubs, Shrinking, and Bad Monkey.
While talking with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff ahead of Rooster‘s debut on HBO Max, co-writers and frequent collaborators Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses break down the inspiration behind their new comedy series. And while, yes, Lawrence acknowledges “it’s a Steve Carell show,” the heart behind Rooster is a father-daughter relationship that the trio discovered when they bonded over their own relationships with their daughters. “This was a new stage of our lives for us,” Lawrence says, “so we thought that would be a cool thing to write about.”
Loosely based on their friend and author, Carl Hiaasen (author of Bad Monkey), Rooster is about best-selling writer, Greg Russo (Carell), who runs to his daughter’s rescue. Katie, played by Charly Clive, is going through a personal life crisis, and now her marriage and her job as a college professor are seemingly up in flames — like the house she set on fire. Enter good old, recently divorced Dad, whose status as a somewhat well-known writer could be the leverage he needs to save Katie from being fired.
In this interview, Lawrence and Tarses discuss their inspiration for Rooster, how Carell was a massive piece of their puzzle, but how it all finally came together with a strong ensemble. In the video above or the transcript below, find out which cast members became standouts on set, even changing the original character in the process, and how Lawrence and Tarses would orchestrate a multiverse crossover with Scrubs, Shrinking, and Bad Monkey.
Once Steve Carell Was on Board, ‘Rooster’ Hinged on This Character’s Story
“Yeah, it’s a Steve Carell show, but he really embraces the ensemble of it all.”
PERRI NEMIROFF: What was idea number one, the thing that started this all, but then also, did you have a break-story moment along the way, something you came up with that made you think, “This idea for Rooster really is whole and ready to go?”
MATT TARSES: We were working on Bad Monkey together, and then wanted to do something else. We had a decent enough time doing that that we wanted to try to do something else.
BILL LAWRENCE: And we haven’t been getting along today because he admitted that he has never watched the finale of Scrubs. That’s why he said “decent enough time.” He worked on Scrubs and never watched the finale. It’s no big deal. It’s not part of your story.
TARSES: There was nobody we wanted to work with more than Steve Carell. We sat down with him, and we found out that we had this shared thing, which is that we all had daughters about the same age, all who were moving off into the world, and much as we wanted to still be in their lives and control their lives, they were not as interested in that as they had been. This was a new stage of our lives for us, a parenting stage and an adulthood stage, and so we thought that would be a cool thing to write about.
LAWRENCE: There are two things that made me know, once Steve’s like, “I’m in,” that we had kind of figured out the pilot because the trick of the show is, yeah, it’s a Steve Carell show, but he really embraces the ensemble of it all, and so every character’s got a story.
The story that we had to crack to make work was the story of Charly Clive, of his daughter, becoming an autonomous, independent woman, which is kind of her series journey. To do that, you have to strip her of everything from the start. So, it took us a second, but when we came up with her burning a house down, and doing it by burning Phil Dunster’s favorite book, those are things we knew were good pieces of exposition, but they’re sometimes hard to make funny, and we were able to, hopefully, make it funny by accident because he liked War and Peace by Tolstoy, and Matt had a quote…
TARSES: From Chekhov.
LAWRENCE: From Chekhov. Matt’s booksmart. I’m not. I’m dumb. I thought Chekhov and Tolstoy were the same person.
TARSES: [Laughs] All Russians are the same people.
LAWRENCE: Well, they’re both Russian, and they’re both writers. There can only be one. And that created the scene where Steve had prepped his whole argument with his daughter’s husband based on the guy loving Chekhov and not Tolstoy, and we went with it. Watching Steve do that and make it funny, we knew we had hopefully figured out the tone of a show that could be funny and still authentically about emotional stories with some depth.
Inside the Casting of ‘Rooster’
Lawrence and Tarses discuss finding the perfect cast and dynamics for an all-star ensemble.
I’ll highlight how well-cast this show is a little more. Can you guys tell me which role was the easiest to cast, where it was like the right person just magically appeared, but then also the character in your show that took the most legwork to find the perfect fit for?
LAWRENCE: There are a billion easy ones, and I’ll rattle them off. The show started because of Steve. We just wanted to work with him, so getting him was a huge, monster home run. Getting John C. McGinley, we almost had to do it because we stole his life, because he has a weird sauna he built himself, and when you talk to the guy, he makes you get in it, and he’s way too comfortable with his body, and he makes you get in a cold plunge pool. It’s very, very weird. Rory Scovel, who plays the cop, has been in one of my shows before, and Matt and I both think he’s one of the funniest untapped comic voices out there. Phil Dunster, I had worked with him on Ted Lasso, and I’m still tricked by accents, so I thought he was really like Jamie Tartt, and he showed up talking in a different accent. I was like, “What’s going on?” He’s like, “Oh, that one was fake.” So that was very confusing. But those were all very easy. I didn’t take your hard one, did I?
TARSES: You didn’t take my hard one. We wrote this character of Cristle, Walt’s assistant, for an actor who would be sort of buttoned-up and kind of a little bit of an executive assistant trope.
LAWRENCE: Almost like Radar, who knew things before they happened, etc..
TARSES: And Allison Jones brought us Annie Mumolo, and we said, “No, that’s not who we’re thinking of.” We were really resistant to her.
LAWRENCE: That’s good that you let her know that publicly.
TARSES: Just because we had this idea of her in our head. I only say this because we gave her the part, and we changed the part a little because she was so different from it, and she became so much better and bigger than that part was ever meant to be, and one of my very favorite things in the show.
LAWRENCE: People don’t give props enough. We make an art of taking credit for other people’s work.
TARSES: Especially him. [Laughs]
LAWRENCE: How dare you! Allison Jones is an icon in casting circles. I’ll tell you, she put Charly Clive in front of us to play Steve’s daughter, who you had to believe is Steve’s daughter, and had to be able to do pathos and comedy at the same level Steve does, and we had never seen her before. So, from main roles like that, and then she also is like, “Hey, here’s one of your best students. You’re going to cast this guy.” And it was Maximo [Salas], who plays Tommy. I can’t believe how authentic that kid is in this dynamic of Steve.
Our burden now, because of her, is trying to keep all these amazing people, Robby Hoffman, all of them, in this world if we’re lucky enough to do more.
Creator Lawrence also shares a funny story about how the O.G. series sometimes had real patients show up because they shot at former working hospital.
Bill Lawrence and the TV Multiverse of Madness
The pair share their ideas for crossover with Shrinking, Scrubs, and more.
Because you’ve both worked on so many other wonderful shows with A+ ensembles, if you could see one character from Rooster cross paths with one character from Bad Monkey, Shrinking, or Ted Lasso, who would you choose, and how might that scene play out?
TARSES: That’s hard!
LAWRENCE: I got some. I would want to see Steve Carell and Harrison Ford together, just because of how iconic it would be and how much fun, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in a scene together, so I’ll separate that.
Then my other one is from Shrinking. I would like to see my wife, [Christa Miller], as Liz, try to do a scene with Phil Dunster and not be charmed by him. Because I think it would be a challenge for her, for me to say, “You have to dislike this person because at his core, he’s the antagonist.” And I don’t think she’d be able to help herself because he has that weird skill of an actor that can do reprehensible things and yet not have you completely hate him, though we’re really pushing the boundaries as the season goes on.
TARSES: I have one. We have this fantasy of the Rooster character that Greg’s character writes of someday making that into a movie where Steve actually plays Rooster, and we get our friend Carl Hiaasen to write it, and I could see a funny crossover of the Yancy character from Bad Monkey and the Rooster character meeting in Florida somewhere.
LAWRENCE: Also, by the way, the bad guy should be — we were lucky, in Bad Monkey, the bad guy this year was John Malkovich, and spoiler alert, the dude’s hysterical.
TARSES: Oh, god. Yeah, that would be incredible. So, there you go.
LAWRENCE: That’s my favorite question, by the way. I just want to do this all day. It feels like a drinking game.
I could sit here and do it all day. I always like to have an answer in my back pocket, just in case …
LAWRENCE: What’s yours?
Well, Greg and Yancy was immediately the one I had to write down, given the real-world nature of how these stories came to screen, and also what Greg as a character is going through in this show.
LAWRENCE: We should have said that, by the way, since you knew that it was based on Carl Hiaasen. I would also be into seeing Turk cross paths with Rory Scovel, just because of how frustrated he would be by him. That would make me really happy.
Rooster debuts on March 8 on HBO Max. Subsequent episodes premiere every Sunday.
- Release Date
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March 8, 2026
- Network
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HBO