Review: In 'Rooster,' Steve Carell leads a gentle comedy about a father-daughter relationship

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

In “Rooster,” a genial comedy premiering Sunday on HBO, Steve Carell, comfortable as an uncomfortable person, plays Greg Russo, the author of a best-selling series of books whose hero is named Rooster.He has come to leafy, fictional Ludlow College to give a reading, but also because it’s where his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive) teaches art history, and because it’s all over school that her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), a history professor, has left her for Sunny (Lauren Tsai), a graduate student in neuroscience.

He’s a concerned father.“They are light; they are fun.The characters that you like have sex, the ones you don’t get shot in the face,” Greg tells poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) of the “beach read” books he writes, as she ushers him to an auditorium.

Unlike his fictional alter ego, Greg is by his own account a self-conscious introvert, heightened by the fact that his ex-wife, Elizabeth (Connie Britton) — “a philanthropist, a pioneer in corporate gender equality and an accomplished CEO” whose name adorns the school’s new student center — left him five years earlier and he never moved on.Additionally, Greg likes nuts and cocoa, can toss a penny into a jar from across a room, and played minor league hockey, which will put him back on skates here.College president Walter Mann (John C.

McGinley) decides it would be “a feather in his cap” to hire a reluctant Greg, “a best-selling author that the parents have actually heard of,” as an artist-in-residence — a deal he makes impossible to refuse by agreeing to keep Katie on staff after she accidentally burns down Archie’s house.(She was only trying to burn his first edition of “War & Peace.”) It’s a role quite like the one McGinley played/plays on “Scrubs,” but more politic and better dressed, when dressed — he takes meetings in his backyard sauna.And they�...