All 10 episodes of Rooster Season 1 are now streaming on HBO Max.
The first season of Rooster just wrapped, but the team behind the breakout HBO comedy is already deep into planning Season 2. I spoke to showrunners BIll Lawrence, who also created Shrinking, Scrubs and Ted Lasso, and Matt Tarses (Sports Night, The Goldbergs) ahead of the Season 1 finale to break down what we can expect from a new batch of episodes – which is coming sooner rather than later.
Season 2 of HBO’s Rooster will consist of 10 episodes and air within a year.
“We’ve broken the first four episodes,” Lawrence says. “We’re doing 10, and HBO wants it on within a year or less. They’ve got us grinding, so we’ve been at it for a while.”
“Bill’s looking to his right and seeing the board,” Tarses added, referring to a wall of notecards breaking down episode and story beats for Season 2. Lawrence pointed the camera at the cards but slyly whipped it away before I got the chance to read any details.
The Rooster Season 1 finale saw tons of major decisions and milestones from the staff and students at the fictional Ludlow College. Bestselling-author-turned-college-instructor Greg (Steve Carell) decided to stay at Ludlow after finding both professional personal fulfillment. Meanwhile both Greg’s daughter Katie (Charly Clive) and grad student Sunny (Lauren Tsai) both dumped pompous professor Archie (Phil Dunster) and started new chapters. According to Lawrence, the finale’s trajectory remained largely unchanged because the writers were anticipating a renewal.
“We were feeling pretty confident because the show premiered really well,” Lawrence says. “[There were three] things that we kept [in the finale] that we knew we wanted to do at the start. One was we wanted to do a big parallel from Greg at the beginning as a lonely guy who had to invent people that were giving him a going away party [who then] at the end gets to realize his self-worth a little bit [and be] super important to a bunch of people.
“We [also] wanted to make sure that Connie Britton [took] Greg’s world and made it her own at the end with a little cliffhanger. And then the last thing we wanted to do – we knew we wanted to end the year with both Sunny and Katie as women that [were] free of the burden of a toxic guy. That’s a story generator for next year.”
