HBO's latest entry from the creators of Ted Lasso and Shrinking is Rooster, starring Steve Carell as a famous novelist who descends on his college-professor daughter's life with the intent to rescue her from disaster. Except the show's real subject isn't the daughter's crisis—it's what happens when a man discovers his carefully constructed identity is negotiable.
Set on a college campus, Rooster chronicles Carell's character's unexpected reinvention. He befriends students, crashes frat parties, and attempts to live up to his own fictional creation. Once again, HBO has delivered a show exploring late-life malleability and the messy inheritance of parent-child relationships.
But what really matters is what this reveals about television's shifting conception of masculinity.
We're watching a slow, cultural rejection of the angry man archetype that dominated prestige television for two decades. The Don Drapers and Gregory Houses—brilliant, caustic, fundamentally furious—have given way to protagonists doing the quieter, harder work of self-examination.
Take The Bear's "Forks" episode. Carmy sends his volatile cousin Richie to intern at Ever, a three-Michelin-star Chicago restaurant, ostensibly to prepare him for Carmy's own upscale restaurant opening. But Richie's assignment is humbling: he dries forks. "Jesus fucking Christ," he mutters. "You've got to be kidding me."
Except the episode isn't about forks at all.
It's about a man learning to find peace within structure, redemption within discipline. As Richie absorbs the restaurant's ethos through smoke breaks and preservice meetings, he transforms—from angry and lost to grounded and purposeful. He discovers what he can contribute rather than what he can dominate.
Anger to transformation. Anxious to peace. Lost to found.
Ted Lasso didn't just succeed commercially; it captured something culturally urgent: an appetite for male characters pursuing self-awareness rather than dominance. Shrinking doubled down—therapy-adjacent, emotionally excavating, unafraid of vulnerability. Now, Rooster extends the logic further: what if reinvention wasn't about conquering but discovering?
This feels like more than a trend.
It reflects a genuine cultural conversation about what masculinity owes itself and others. The men we're watching on screen aren't being feminized—a lazy critique that misses the point entirely. Rather, they're being allowed complexity: to fail without swagger, to grow without conquest narratives, to sit with discomfort.
Whether that's because the culture is changing and television is reflecting it, or television is modeling something the culture needs—probably both. Either way, it's a genuine inflection point from the prestige TV of the 2000s and 2010s.
Not domination. Discovery.
Not sure I like it, but I am in therapy, and I have watched "Forks" just under a dozen times.
-Marc
