Rooster Recap: If the Shoe Slips

Rooster
White Whale
Season 1 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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“Whatever you do, take care of your shoes.” This is wise advice from the band Phish, almost certainly a staple on the Ludlow campus, and a recommendation that Greg probably should have heeded when he chose footwear for his first day as a professor. Greg’s shiny, slippery, and squeaky shoes land him in several predicaments, and also cause him to spill one of his beloved cups of hot chocolate. Blasphemy! But I’m going to cut Greg a little slack because he’s a total noob in a pond full of pros. As I mentioned in my last recap, it’s all kind of giving 40-Year-Old Virgin vibes as Greg is so innocent and sweet; everyone else has a bit of an edge to them; and they’re all very quick to either dismiss him, make him feel uncomfortable, or give him unsolicited advice.

Greg has never been to college before. We already know this, but it’s a fact that this episode simply won’t let us forget: Look at Greg! He’s like a freshman! He’s homesick and looking to establish friendships and making lots of mistakes! It’s a good thing Steve Carell is so very charming or else this schtick might get old fast. 

You know who is not so charming? Katie! Sure, Katie doesn’t know that Greg took the position as writer-in-residence in order to save her job, but she could definitely be a little gentler with her dad. In this episode, she bails on him after agreeing to hang at a hockey game and forces her TA to take ownership of a cigarette that isn’t hers so that he won’t yell at her. I truly adored Katie in the first episode — I would have fully hung out with her tree-climbing, chain-smoking, emotionally imbalanced character — so I’m hoping this is just growing pains on her part, but she’s starting to give me the ick, and I don’t like it. It’s probably just because she’s hurting Greg, and my heart wants to protect him at all costs … even if it is from his daughter. 

To be fair to Katie, she is experiencing a serious crisis of confidence. She lurks on Archie teaching his class and then wanders in to see Dylan, the newly installed dean of faculty. When Katie pops her frazzled head into Walt’s office, half-joking and half-serious about maybe burning something else down, Dylan tells her she’ll try to lift her suspension even though she doesn’t know how her job works yet. 

Dylan becomes the benefactor of this new position when Dean Riggs (a.k.a. V. Riggs, a.k.a. Vincent Riggs) has some sort of cardiac event when she confronts him about her now-defunct poetry review. It’s a smart move to give Dylan more responsibilities as we get to see her struggle with things that she once thought were simple, but also because we know she’s generally a force for good, and it’s always entertaining to watch good people grapple with thorny problems. Toward the end of the episode, she’s called out to police the new dirtbag hockey coach (a perfectly cast Scott MacArthur). The coach is swigging from a beer bottle, visibly drunk even from across a hockey rink, and roundly berating his players. He meets up with Dylan here, and the two have an energetic conversation in which she razzes him for acting like a freshman, and he calls her out for being mean. Curiously, we also learn that Greg played minor-league hockey for a team with a questionable mascot (I cannot believe he wouldn’t realize that the jersey was offensive, but whatever) and that he still enjoys watching hockey on TV. Is this man going to be called upon to do some hockey? Is this going to turn into a Ted Lasso-but-with-hockey situation? Was this in Steve Carell’s contract? We all know he can skate.

Elsewhere, in what feels like an entirely different (but still entertaining) show, Sunny seeks to secure an internship before her baby bump starts showing. She chats with her roommate about her dilemma and gets roundly shushed by Archie, who initially seems to only care about his book and the difficulties of his own life. When Sunny mentions that she might ask Walt to be her adviser, Archie balks because he knows how nosy Walt is. Once, Walt overheard Archie saying he might want a dog, and the next thing he knew, Walt was standing in his living room with a full-ass dog named Roscoe. In my opinion, giving a person an animal (or even a plant … anything that requires care to keep it alive) without asking first is pretty insane. I seriously don’t understand people who give dogs and cats in ribbon-bedecked boxes for Christmas or birthday presents. Don’t do it, people! 

Okay, well, I guess the dog gifting worked out well for Archie, because he loves Roscoe, and Roscoe avoided Archie naming him something very clunky and Russian. (Dogs prefer shorter names!) Archie adores smooching that pooch on the lips, though, and when Sunny sends him an article about the bacteria in a canine’s mouth, he hilariously responds, “Shan’t be reading that!” Archie actually gets in a couple big laughs this week as he eventually agrees to help Sunny find a mentor. First, he attempts to bribe Dean Riggs with a fancy bottle of wine, and then snatches it back when Riggs has his heart attack. Then he resigns himself to letting Sunny team up with Walt. Walt is giddy that he gets a front seat to the Sunny-Archie-Katie mama drama, and Sunny is relieved to have a mentor who will give her his honest opinion. These two are going to cook up some fun, I think. 

Back in the classroom, Greg is trying his best to put his lack of academic experience aside and focus on actually teaching. He brings a refreshing lack of ego to the proceedings, acknowledging that he never went to college himself but that he does know something about writing, as he’s written 11 best-selling novels. He continues to insist on calling them “beach reads,” always downplaying his own accomplishments, but his humility endears him to most of the students. 

Ronnie — the student who cross-examined Greg about the misogyny in his books at his initial talk — is in the seminar, and she’s clearly not happy that the teacher has changed since she enrolled. The rest of the class seems to be into it, though: Eva, the sexual firecracker from last week, is hyped to take the class, shouting “Let’s go!” when Greg reveals the name of the course (The Art of the Page-Turner), while Tommy and his burnout buddy Spooner are drinking in everything that Greg is serving up. However, Ronnie continues to pick at Greg, resulting in him calling her his “white whale.” This clearly Moby-Dick-inspired comment lands him in a behavioral review session. Later, his slippery shoes literally land him in trouble when he slips and grabs another student’s breasts to break his fall. This student is reasonable, saying that she realizes it was an accident, but Greg is off to a rocky start in his professorship. I’m not loving the focus on overly “woke” behaviors on campus — yes, sometimes college kids complain about unreasonable things, but they’re seeking a sense of self and learning how to use their voices and how to hold authority accountable, and a liberal-arts college is a bubblelike environment where they safely get to test boundaries. Of course some of them are overly sensitive! They’re learning how to be people!

At the conclusion of the episode, Greg mopes at home, tossing pennies into a jar from afar. He’s a really good shot. That jar seems to have been his closest companion since his divorce, as he brought it with him from Florida. It’s a melancholy note to end on, but since this is a Bill Lawrence show, after all, I’m betting that Greg will find some friends pretty soon. 

Office Hours

• When Greg returns from Florida, he tells Katie that his “boys” threw him a celebration. When she asks who, he name-checks the cast of Cheers, saying Sam, Cliff, and Norm were there. Katie catches on, asking about Coach, and Greg volleys back that Coach died in season three. The ghost of the dead hockey coach also lingers throughout this episode. Coincidence? I think not.

• “You wrote Grg, bro.” This made me laugh out loud for a very long time. 

• Cristle is totally thirsty for Grg, er, Greg. If her lingering gaze didn’t make it clear before, her offhanded comments about him being a bad boy in the disciplinary committee definitely made her intentions known. And who can blame her?! 

• Hi, Nancy Carell! I just loved watching her make her real-life husband uncomfortable in their scenes together. Here’s hoping that Dean Riggs’s wife will play a bigger role in the story to come. 

• Do we think Ludlow is a college on par with some of the premiere liberal-arts institutions that the country has to offer, like Swarthmore and Williams? Or is it on a lower tier, like Skidmore College? (No shade! I’m a proud Skiddie. Creative thought matters, y’all.)