The new HBO comedy from Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, Rooster, comes at a very odd time, but Steve Carell makes every moment worthwhile.

Bill Lawrence’s comedy relies on its audience to sit with discomfort. Algorithm-driven humour has never been louder, prestige drama has never been darker, and somewhere in between, this calm ten-episode series set on a university is achieving something that is nearly countercultural: it is being truly, unassumingly nice and non-judgemental.

It is more difficult to accomplish than it seems.

The idea is rather straightforward. Steve Carell portrays best-selling novelist Greg Russo. The kind whose novels are popular enough to be embarrassing in literary circles. He takes a Writer in Residence position at the fictional Ludlow College primarily to be closer to his daughter Katie, played by Charly Clive, an art history professor whose marriage has just spectacularly collapsed. Greg arrives wanting to help.

The show’s central, quietly devastating question is whether trying to help translates into being helpful, and whether a father’s love, no matter how sincere, is truly welcome. These are the show’s primary, subtly heartbreaking questions.

The creative trademark of Lawrence and Tarses, who worked together on Scrubs before Lawrence went on to co-create Ted Lasso and Shrinking, is that they write communities rather than protagonists. Rooster carefully adheres to that pattern. The campus of a college is not a setting. Greg always speaks a dialect of this environment, which has its own social hierarchies, ego and insecurity rituals, and language. The particular loneliness of a man who has spent decades being fluent everywhere and suddenly isn’t is where the show gets a great deal of comedic nuance.

Carell is working in a register here that is genuinely difficult to describe without underselling it. Greg Russo is not Michael Scott. He is smarter, more self-aware, more quietly sad. But Carell brings the same foundational skill he has always had: the ability to make performance visible from the inside. Greg is a man who knows how to perform ease, charm, and literary authority, and Carell lets you see the machinery without ever letting the character become a caricature.

When Greg is out of his depth, which is frequently, Carell plays it without the safety net of self-deprecation. The discomfort lands clean. It is, in the best sense, uncomfortable to watch, which is exactly the effect the writing requires.

The show’s treatment of awkwardness is its most distinctive quality. Lawrence and Tarses do not use social discomfort as a setup for punchlines. They use it as subject matter.

Charly Clive is doing quietly exceptional work as Katie — holding resentment and need in the same breath, never letting either resolve into something tidier than it actually is. Danielle Deadwyler, as English department head Dylan, provides the show’s sharpest counterpoint to Carell’s perpetual low-grade unease: assured, intellectually formidable, and quietly amused in ways that gradually shift into something warmer.

Phil Dunster, as Archie, Katie’s estranged husband and fellow Ludlow academic, rounds out the ensemble with typically precise work. The three of them give the show its texture. Carell gives it its heart.

The series has already been renewed for a second season, which will follow the spring semester at Ludlow. The renewal feels right. Rooster is the kind of show that benefits from time; it is building something incrementally, and a single season can only partially reveal it.

What it has already revealed is enough. In a television landscape that has convinced itself that darkness is depth, Rooster makes the quieter and more difficult argument: that a man learning to be present for his daughter is worth your full attention. That kindness, rendered honestly, is not soft.

It is, in fact, the hardest thing to write.