Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses Laugh Through Parenting Panic in HBO's 'Rooster' With Steve Carell (Exclusive)

The co-creators of HBO's Rooster, Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, open up about the real-life struggles behind their comedy series in this exclusive interview. The series, which stars Steve Carell and Charly Clive, uses laughs to tackle fatherhood's scariest chapter, watching your child grow up.

Bill Lawrence, who John C. McGinley just called the "Norman Lear of his generation," has created shows like Scrubs, Spin City, Cougar Town, Clone High, Ted Lasso, Shrinking, Bad Monkey, and more. Tarses has had pivotal behind-the-scenes roles on shows like Sports Night, Scrubs, The Goldbergs, Mad About You, and more.

Rooster Creators Joke About Fatherhood Dread: 'You're Going to Feel Like an Old, Pathetic Guy'

Men’s Journal: Thank you so much for talking to me this afternoon.

Matt Tarses: It’s a pleasure.

Bill Lawrence: Of course. We're sick of each other, so we give each other crap.

Matt Tarses: We'll talk to anybody.

Bill Lawrence: Anybody other than each other.

Men’s Journal: How did your own experiences as parents affect how you wrote Rooster’s core father-daughter relationship?

Bill Lawrence: I don't know if you did your research or if you heard us gabbing about it, but this show started with that. It's a really good question, because when we met with Steve, we were trying to figure out what to write about. Matt, Steve, and I found that we're all struggling with the same thing: we all have daughters of literally the same age who have reached that transition from young girl to young woman or young adult, where they no longer need us to disrupt their lives and to micromanage and try to do everything we can to keep them safe and from getting hurt. And because of that, Matt, not as badly as me, but we desperately want...

Matt Tarses: We double down.

Bill Lawrence: We double down and desperately want to be. And the truth is, when you hold a gun to your head, it's not about them and taking care of them. It's about wanting to do it yourself and not knowing who you're supposed to be if you're not the dad.

Men’s Journal: I have a daughter, so I can totally relate to a lot of the themes. She's not in the same age range, but I could totally understand where you were coming from.

Bill Lawrence: Well, dude, Matt's daughter, Fiona Tarses, actually plays one of the students on Rooster. She graduated from Brown. She's an awesome actress, and she plays Zoe. My daughter isn't on the show, but I get to work with her in other ways.

Matt Tarses: So, you'll see when your 11-year-old gets older that it gets more and more complicated. And you're going to be sad, like we are. (Laughs)

Bill Lawrence: Yeah, it's going to make you sad inside. And you're going to feel like an old, pathetic guy that doesn't know what he's supposed to do and doesn't want to tell anybody that he's lonely.

Men’s Journal: So, you're trying to fill me with existential dread this morning. (Laughs)

Bill Lawrence: That's the goal.

Matt Tarses: That's what we're here for.

Men’s Journal: When you guys were able to bring Steve Carell on the show, how did that affect how you wrote the show? Because he's so amazing at being able to play characters who do these crazy things in a way that is still so relatable and lovable.

Bill Lawrence: It's like having the answer key to a huge test, man. Matt and I started working together way back on Scrubs when I was 28. I think Matt was in his mid-30s.

Matt Tarses: That's not true. We're the same age. (Laughs)

Bill Lawrence: He's been doing his own thing. We worked on Bad Monkey together, and we wanted to create a show together. We just started from, wouldn't it be great to do a show for Steve Carell? He's so influential for both of us as comedy writers and someone who actually turned out to be the same way in real life that you would want him to be.

The second that he got cast in this show, we knew we had somebody with the skills to do broad, silly comedy and, as you said, still make it feel believable and then take sharp curves into moments of emotional pathos. He ended up setting the tone for the whole show.

Matt Tarses: So, we conceived of him as the guy from the beginning, so it was always him in our heads. Then, once he was on board, it just got better and better because he would, in the most polite way, sort of guide us a little bit and make sure the character was staying true to what we had conceived of and what he was thinking. It's become this great version of all three of our ideas.

Bill Lawrence: Because if he didn't police us, we just would have been like, “Hey, can we write you as a The 40-Year-Old Virgin version of Michael Scott just over and over because it makes us laugh so hard?” And he would never let us do that.

Men’s Journal: I can imagine the temptation.

Bill Lawrence: Dude, any comedy writer, without a doubt, he influenced the way that you write and the way that you hear dialogue.

Men’s Journal: You are both known for working on shows that are hilarious and have emotional warmth to them. Before they watch the show, what do you think viewers should anticipate about how the show will make them feel? Either similar to your previous work or different than.

Bill Lawrence: I think partly because Matt was really driving me. The thing about Shrinking, the last one I've really been running, and even Ted Lasso before that, they're kind of bathed in pathos. Shrinking is a show about grief and the death of a spouse and navigating your way through that.

Matt, when he partnered up with me, he wanted this to be really comedy-forward. So there's definitely heart and real emotions in this and a character study. But for me, I haven't written and gotten to be on as much of a comedy-forward half-hour show as this in a long time. That's mostly because of this partnership.

Matt Tarses: But I do want to say that I was very adamant that we make this comedy forward. But watching the show back as we edited it, I think my favorite scenes are almost always the ones that have this emotional undercurrent.

Bill Lawrence: That's weird to hear you say it to him because you would never say it to me personally.

Matt Tarses: I won't say that to Bill. And if Bill hears about that, I will deny it.

Men’s Journal: Well, I'm happy to have been here to facilitate that moment for you. (Laughs) The other thing I was curious about is how it feels to get to reunite on Rooster with people like John C. McGinley and Phil Dunster. How happy were you to reunite with several actors on this show?

Bill Lawrence: It's like my favorite. I'm so lucky to get to do what I do. I'm so grateful. It’s not the first time I got this question, “Why I would do that.” And I always say, “If you're lucky enough to work with actors and actresses or writers that you think are super talented and that you would want to spend time with anyway, to not do it over and over, it makes you an insane person.”

The cool thing for me is that Matt polices me and he said, “We can have these people on, but they can't play any version of characters they've been on your shows before.” And so, one of the things I'm really proud of, and it's in great part due to him, is that Alan Ruck is quite different than Stewart on Spin City. Phil Dunster is not playing Ted Lasso’s Jamie Tartt. And that's because if I did any of that stuff, Matt would kill me.

Matt Tarses: I gave Bill a little bit of grief about, is this like the Bill Lawrence players, but all of them have come in and have exceeded my expectations. They're incredible, and Bill's right. It's rare to find people that are good, period. Also, if they're nice, it's just, why not work with them forever?

Bill Lawrence: Again, something that you still haven't managed to say to me in over a year, so weird. Matt had never worked with Rory Scovel and now he's obsessed with him like a super fan, which both makes me happy and sad at the same time.

Matt Tarses: He's amazing.

Men’s Journal: I am a huge fan of your work, so I don't want you to take this the wrong way. In fact, the first song my wife and I danced to at our wedding was “The Book of Love” by Peter Gabriel because of the finale scene from Scrubs.

Bill Lawrence: Yes!

Men’s Journal: But, I just have to ask, as somebody who has so many shows, how do you find the time to do all the work you guys are doing?

Bill Lawrence: All right. I'm old. I can run maybe a show and a half a year.

Matt Tarses: Hmm. (Laughs)

Bill Lawrence: And even that, Matt thinks, is questionable. One of my greatest strengths as a producer is, the joke version of it is taking credit for other people's work. The truth is, that very same thing we talked about, I have spoken about this a lot, is working with people that you're friends with, that know your voice, and you know their voice.

This show wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't be able to even be part of it if it weren't for Matt. Scrubs, Aseem Batra, who's running it, her first job ever, I hired her on Scrubs, and she was there for a great chunk of it. Getting to work with her on that is a gift. There's Shrinking, if anybody looks it up, it's me and Neil Goldman, who was also one of the original Scrubs writers way back when.

So I'm very lucky that I've been doing this as long as I have, because there's so many talented men and women that I get to partner up with and do these things with. This one is super fun for me because Matt's had such a great career on his own. We haven't really gotten to work together that much. I sucked him back in to do Bad Monkey together and then it actually went well, and he didn't want kill me. So we decided to try and create a show together. It's been one of the best professional experiences of my life.

Matt Tarses: It's been fun.

Bill Lawrence: He said, “It's been fine. It's been fine.”

Men’s Journal: Thank you so much for joining me today. It was a real pleasure to get to talk to both of you.