‘Rooster’ Co-Creator On Loneliness Theme & ‘Claustrophobic Fishbowl’

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Rooster Episode 6, titled “Cop Hawk.”

As with many a Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses show, there are always new connections to be found, and HBO Max’s Rooster is no different.

Co-creator Lawrence spoke to the parallels between Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) and Katie (Charly Clive), who each face their own surprises in life, and how loneliness affects them as well as many of the comedy ensemble’s characters in their own ways.

“[Dylan] talks about it in the pilot of, ‘You ever feel surrounded by people but still really alone,?’ because she didn’t really find her community. And Charly’s character, Katie talks about how, [when] she got to this school, she didn’t build relationships because she just met a significant other, a partner, and right away became — which I think happens to lots of young men and young women — became his partner, rather than her own self,” Lawrence said. “And so those two things are mirroring each other. I mean, Dylan is much more successful in this show, you’ll see, in finding out that she wants to have a voice, and figuring out who she wants to be in the bigger scheme of things.”

As of the end of episode six, two cliffhanger situations have made things interesting for Dylan and for Steve Carell’s Greg Russo as well as Maximo Salas’ Tommy and Annie Mumolo’s Cristle.

Dylan, who has settled enough into her role of Interim Dean of Faculty to make the office her own, might be booted from the position with Alan Ruck’s Dean Vincent Riggs’ healthy recovery from a heart attack putting a spring in his step as he enters her office and immediately reclaims it as his own.

Deadwyler and her costar Phil Dunster weighed in on this curve ball moment — because Riggs was last seen intubated and unconscious in the hospital in episode three following the cardiac arrest — in a separate interview with Deadline.

Throughout the season, Dylan has shown support for Katie as well as Greg’s daughter and colleague of Walt, Dylan and Archie navigates the unraveling of her marriage to Archie, whom she repeatedly calls narcissistic. Archie cheated on Katie with graduate student Sunny (Lauren Tsai), who is now pregnant with his child.

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“In the pilot, particularly Katie’s world, is completely turned upside down. In a very interesting way, she’s observing it quite intellectually. She’s almost studying it. She watches Archie and Sunny. She comments on it. She feels like she’s sort of becoming an expert in their relationship, maybe because she doesn’t quite want to deal with the breakdown of her own,” Clive told Deadline. “I think that that is a fascinating thing for a character, because then at the end of the episode, that all falls apart, and she ends up burning a house down. In an effort to manage everything, she compartmentalizes things, and then that comes to a head in a really funny and interesting, quite like relatable way. I think a lot of people are going to be like, ‘Go on. Katie,’ which is great.”

In episode six, Dylan tells Katie that she “doesn’t have to watch this movie” between Archie and Sunny anymore as Dylan guides the female Professor Russo along after she sees her husband console his paramor. Add to the already complex situation that Katie and Archie are also sleeping together on the side.

[Katie]’s road is a little more convoluted, because it involves marriage and betrayal, but I think that they’re both kind of — and by the way, a lot of the characters are intentionally — Greg’s lonely. Walt says, ‘I’m painfully lonely,’ [because] his wife’s gone for half the year,” Lawrence told Deadline. “The main similarity we were kind of going for is to be in this claustrophobic fishbowl, which is a college environment, and to still feel very lonely.”

And claustrophobic, it is, as Greg finds out by the end of the episode when he gets caught in Cristle’s kitchen naked from the waste down by his favored student, Tommy. Turns out Tommy is Cristle’s son, and he was living with Greg up until Greg encouraged Tommy to move home after his parents stopped paying his rent when his GPA took a hit.

New episodes of Rooster arrive on HBO and HBO Max at 7 p.m. ET/PT every Sunday.

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