“Rooster” ends with women in the lead

The “Rooster” finale coincides with the end of Ludlow College’s fall semester, which inspires Greg Russo (Steve Carell) to take one last risk with the dean of faculty – showing her the galley of his new book. We’re not meant to view this as a conversation between a visiting teacher and a top administrator but as a vulnerable moment between Greg and his good, possibly best, friend Dylan Shepard (Danielle Deadwyler).

They began the season as peers, of sorts; Dylan is an English professor at Ludlow, while Greg never went to college. Dylan is a poet, while Greg is a famous author. Greg’s class, “The Art of the Page Turner,” fell into his lap, and so did Dylan’s role as interim dean of faculty. But she had to fight to wrest the position permanently from the grasp of an inept, problematic man. She excels at navigating those. Greg is not among them, and yet Dylan and Greg have found themselves, several times, at opposite ends of a table used for faculty disciplinary hearings.

That’s part of why he values his friend’s opinion of his book and its cover image of a sexpot whose head is edited out of the frame. Dylan playfully consults Greg’s toughest critic: his skeptical student Ronni (Sophia Macy). She’s not impressed, but later admits she read the book and didn’t hate it.

That scene contains a significant Easter egg, by the way – Greg’s new book is his first to feature a female protagonist. In their way, co-creators Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses designed “Rooster” with similar intent, using Carell’s author as a vehicle into a story they meant to be about Greg’s daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), figuring out her life as her marriage implodes.

Ditto for Dylan, and Cristle (Annie Mumolo), the college president’s office administrator who seduces Greg, and Sunny (Lauren Tsai), the graduate student whom Katie’s ridiculous husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), knocks up.

But a second look at this season reveals that the characters afforded the most complexity and humanity, other than Greg, are the women in his life.

Lawrence and Tarses were initially inspired by their experience as fathers to write a story about navigating the bonds that dads and daughters share, and how they change in adulthood.

“We have these daughters who we still have trouble not infantilizing a little bit,” Tarses admitted.

(Katrina Marcinowski/HBO) Lauren Tsai in “Rooster”

“Maybe it’s an indictment of parenting now, but we should both want our daughters not to need us anymore,” Lawrence added. Katie’s journey towards a fully autonomous adulthood is their way of interrogating that, making her story as central to “Rooster” as Greg’s reinvention.

Katie spends much of the season vacillating between raging at Archie and feeling guilt over falling for his manipulative overtures. Sunny, meanwhile, is torn between pursuing her career and remaining with the man who can’t fully commit for the sake of their kid.

Katie must also confront Greg’s interference in her life, something he does out of love but she views as holding her back. She doesn’t need his help, she realizes – or Archie’s, for that matter.

“A lot of Greg and Katie’s relationship is them both trying to get the other one to be somewhere they’re not quite yet,” said Clive, “and then finally finding each other in a funny way, and in a frustrating way – and in a way that feels quite real.”

That culminates in Katie lovingly pushing away Greg and her business titan of a mother, Elizabeth (Connie Britton), once she discovers how many strings they pulled on her behalf. On the bright side, Katie also kicks Archie to the curb. When she runs back to Sunny, he finds out that she’s left him, too.

“Archie Bates . . . I truly hope that you end up happy,” Katie says confidently. “Oh . . . I want to divorce. No rush, though. I know the holidays can be crazy. We’ll figure it out!” This time, she’s the one who walks out on him.

“I grew up, and Matt grew up, writing ‘guy’ comedy,” Lawrence said in a pre-season conversation, explaining his and Tarses’ curiosity about what it means for women like Katie, Dylan, Sunny and Cristle to come into their own, especially in the male-dominated realm of academia.

Mumolo, who co-wrote “Bridesmaids” with Kristen Wiig, had extensive latitude in shaping Cristle’s persona. When she came to “Rooster,” she said, Cristle was a conceptual kernel she teased into a labyrinth. “There’s this facade, but then there’s this whole world going on inside her head,” Mumolo said. “And there are only little moments where it has the opportunity to leak out.”

Tsai felt similarly appreciative of the authorship she had over Sunny, a character who in other series might have been flattened into someone to root against.

(Patrick Wymore/HBO) Annie Mumolo in “Rooster”

“During our first table read — I do remember this quite vividly — Bill said that he did want us to take responsibility over the characters and really make them our own,” recalls Tsai. Having a say in Sunny’s character development was important, she added, “because certainly she shouldn’t just be written off as the other woman or competition when Archie is weaving this terrible web for himself a lot of the time.”

Although Cristle and Sunny’s paths don’t cross frequently, both are bucking certain tropes. Cristle could have been written as an overly maternal figure or, worse, virtually invisible. Mumolo knows differently. Hitting middle age, she says, “brings some women to a point in life where you know your life, your path, your choices have come to home to roost in a very harsh way, and you’re now swimming in that.”

For Cristle, however, that’s not necessarily a place of regret. “Cristle has her own romance novel that she’s living in,” Mumolo said, proven by the administrative assistant’s lusty pull on Greg while also insisting that he keep his distance. She is the epitome of fascination. And like all the women Mumolo knows, she said, “there’s not a behavior that I could not justify.”

Mind you, Lawrence’s signature formula is still very much in play here, centering the plot around a sensitive, sad hero trying to start over after a great loss. In “Shrinking,” Jason Segel’s Jimmy Laird is still recovering from his wife’s death. “Ted Lasso” is about a man pouring his positive vibes into everybody around him because he can’t do that for himself. Like Ted, Greg is also recovering from a long-ago divorce, but what forces him out of his shell is the implosion of his daughter’s.

The difference at the end of “Rooster”’s first season is that we understand why the women in around Greg choose themselves for settle for less, whether that means a consolation prize of a job from a man  — school president Walter Mann, in this case (John C. McGinley) – who’s too timid to rock patriarchy’s yacht, or from a mate that can’t match their power.

“Dylan offers balance and groundedness to Greg, but Greg does the same for her,” Deadwyler said. “And I think we did have a conversation about wrestling with leadership, but settling into it, wanting to maintain it, hadn’t been quite defined.”

As the season went on, Deadwyler continued, Dylan’s story was guided by the idea of becoming someone who you don’t anticipate – including, as Dylan tells Greg in the finale, a woman who would rather have his deep friendship than anything else. “Rather than wanting intimacy in a romantic capacity, just really wanting to be grounded and connected with someone… and finding something much more visceral and much richer.”

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.Sign up here

In a last-minute (albeit entirely predictable) twist, Greg decides to make his one-season seminar into a regular gig just in time for the Ludlow board to give Mann’s job to Elizabeth, the ex-wife he only recently stopped pining for.

Cristle, who turned a drunken one-night stand with Greg into an affair that expired the moment Greg realized her son was one of his prized students, also chooses herself. Dylan settles comfortably into her deanship.

Reinvention and actualization are common to all Lawrence’s shows, along with the notion that nobody is beyond redemption, that we’re all simply human. We leave Greg, Archie and Mann coping with feelings of being left behind. But what looks to some like abandonment feels to others like a new beginning – and that makes me excited to see how high the women in “Rooster” might fly in coming semesters.

All episodes of “Rooster” are streaming on HBO Max.