The first season of Rooster has ended on HBO and HBO Max, and the people behind it are already saying the second season will not be starting from scratch. Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses said everyone will be back for Rooster season 2, setting up a return to the same messy circle of professors, students and family members that carried the comedy through its run.
The finale itself left the show in a familiar place: with work, family and romantic trouble all landing at once. It was set at Christmas and showed Greg giving what he thought was his last lecture to his writing seminar students. He then called Ludlow College President Walter Mann to ask whether he could stay another semester. At the same time, Greg’s daughter Katie and pregnant graduate student Sunny left Archie Bates for good, while Walt suspected that Greg’s ex-wife Beth was angling for his job. It was the kind of ending that closes one chapter only to reopen three others.
Lawrence said in an interview that the show had already planted easter eggs for next year, including characters viewers have not met yet. “You haven’t met Tommy’s dad. You haven’t met the professor that Dylan said, ‘I love you’ to and took it back, which I think is probably super important. [Laughs.] Matt and I always do this on shows, is leave easter eggs for the next year,” he said. He also pointed to Diana as an easter egg on the show, describing her as “the last person that Walt was with before his wife, but also as Sunny’s benefactor.” He added, “[Hopefully] Alan Ruck’s return.”
Tarses said the writing team is trying to widen the world without losing control of it. “I think he’s given away too much with some of those things, but that’s fine. It’s hard because we’ve had the good fortune of all these people being really funny and fun to write for, but we only have 30 minutes to write these episodes,” he said. “And it’s really hard to service all of them. But yes, there will be more. I think that one that [Bill] mentioned is going to be important for a lot of characters.” That matters because the first season’s loose ends were not accidental; they were signals that the next round will lean harder into the relationships the finale only began to expose.
Rooster, created by Lawrence and Tarses for HBO and HBO Max, is built around Greg, played by Steve Carell, alongside Dylan, Tommy, Walt Mann, Katie, Sunny, Archie Bates, Mo and Fred. The setup of the finale, and the comments from the creators after it, point to a second season that is less about resetting the story than opening it up. The question now is not whether the show will keep its cast in place. It already has. The question is which of the newly planted names will matter first when the series comes back.
