Bill Lawrence Is Poised to Have His Soderbergh Year

With three comedies in Emmy contention, the prolific showrunner could join the rarefied air among TV greats. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Darko Sikman/Disney, Katrina Marcinowski/HBO, Apple TV

It’s hard to remember a time when Bill Lawrence was an Emmys afterthought, but before Ted Lasso became a COVID-era sensation, Lawrence spent nearly three decades in the TV trenches while failing to attain the highest order of industry recognition. But in the past five years, Lawrence’s brand of feel-good sitcom — which HBO comedy boss Amy Gravitt describes as his attempt to build a family inside each of his shows — has found ample viewership and Emmys glory across streaming platforms. Now, a new show on HBO coupled with a return to his network roots with the Scrubs reboot offers Lawrence three chances at an Outstanding Comedy Series award this season. Even if only two of his shows get nominated, Lawrence will have accomplished a rare feat in Emmys history, one that only a handful of TV legends have achieved before him.

Lawrence’s newest series, Rooster, has all the signatures of the prolific showrunner: midlife crises, bemused comedic banter, and ritualized self-reflection (that barrel sauna!). The HBO comedy stars Steve Carell as an airport-fiction author coaxed into taking a writer-in-residence position at the college where his daughter (Charly Clive) teaches. Lawrence has figured out a way to set a comedy on a college campus in 2026 without descending into a didactic cavalcade of generational grievance, and he’s even managed to be the one TV auteur to successfully harness Carell as an avatar of middle-aged cultural displacement without making him smarmy or gross. Rooster has emerged as an ensemble comedy about people trying to figure out their shit and crossing the otherwise prudent boundaries that exist between parents, children, teachers, students, colleagues, and friends to do so, and it seems to have struck a chord. The first season averaged 6.5 million viewers, putting it in the realm of HBO’s most-watched freshman comedies.

But it’s not the only Bill Lawrence series to see a surge in popularity this TV season. The season-three premiere of Shrinking became the rare Apple TV series to appear on the Nielsen charts, evidence of a show growing in viewership well into its run. Like Rooster, the series presents as a character study of a man at a crossroads in his personal and professional lives: As Jimmy, Jason Segel is a grieving widower and frustrated therapist who begins to transgress his professional boundaries by bluntly telling his patients how to act. As an elevator pitch, this does the trick, but the series has since blossomed into the most charming and effective version of itself after opening up to a deep bench of supporting characters, including — but by no means limited to — Jimmy’s mentor (Harrison Ford), colleague (Jessica Williams), best friend (Michael Urie), next-door frenemy (Christa Miller), patient (Luke Tennie), and daughter (Lukita Maxwell). It’s the Bill Lawrence way, mapping the comedic struggles of a group of circumstantially thrown-together compatriots to move on to their next phase of life.

This year, Shrinking is poised to have its strongest Emmy showing yet following seven nominations last year, including acting nods for Segel, Williams, Ford, and Urie as well as the show’s first-ever Outstanding Comedy Series nomination. In 2026, all four previously nominated actors are back in contention, and I’d put good money on Michael J. Fox nabbing a guest-actor nomination for his performance as Ford’s fellow Parkinson’s sufferer. Plus, the absence of The Studio, The Rehearsal, Somebody Somewhere, and What We Do in the Shadows frees up two slots in Directing for a Comedy and four slots in Writing for a Comedy, giving Shrinking a decent chance to score its first nominations in those categories, too.

The role of perennial Emmy contender was largely unfamiliar to Lawrence until the massive success of Ted Lasso. That show landed in the summer of 2020, right when the country needed a charming, good-hearted antidote to the terrors of COVID lockdown and an impending election. The Emmys came in a wave: 20 nominations and seven wins in 2021, including back-to-back Comedy Series wins (Lawrence’s first and to date only two Emmy wins) in 2021 and 2022. For TV fans, it felt like a long time coming for the sitcom stalwart. Lawrence lasted a season as a staff writer on Friends before co-creating Spin City with Gary David Goldberg, a re-teaming of Goldberg and Michael J. Fox from their Family Ties days. Spin City earned Fox four Emmy nominations (he won in 2000) but was otherwise ignored by the TV Academy. 

After four seasons, Lawrence left Spin City when Fox did and went on to create Scrubs at NBC, a series that often gets lost in discussions of how TV comedy evolved in the aughts. It was one of the earlier single-camera network comedies, notable for its ambition (stretchable reality, pivoting from whimsical cutaway gags to gut-punch emotion) in ways that pointed toward where the genre was headed (30 Rock’s own cutaway gags followed a few years later). But the Emmys consistently bypassed Scrubs, more infatuated with the glamour of Sex and the City and reliability of Everybody Loves Raymond until Garden State turned Zach Braff, however momentarily, into a movie star. Lawrence picked up a pair of Outstanding Comedy Series nominations for seasons four and five in 2005 and 2006, with Braff himself nominated in 2005. The show came back in rebooted form earlier this year, with Braff, Donald Faison, and Sarah Chalke reprising their roles. My colleague Roxana Hadadi said the show’s “tonal balance between slapstick and wistfulness was always one of its greatest strengths, and this latest season smoothly brings that combination back to life,” though as an Emmy contender it remains a long shot.

Next came the embattled Cougar Town, a show that for about six episodes revolved around Courtney Cox’s 40-something divorcée attempting to date younger men. Between that premise and the ill-advised title, critics thumped it early and often. The show existed in a no-man’s land where the neanderthals among us didn’t want to watch a show about older women pursuing sex and just as many opposite-leaning folks didn’t want to watch a show that made fun of older women pursuing sex. Lawrence and the show’s cast and crew pivoted smoothly but quickly, and by the end of the first season, Cougar Town had found its groove as a show about a wine-glugging crew of neighbors, family members, romantic partners, exes, co-workers turned friends, and frenemies, all held loosely inside the gravitational field of a Florida cul-de-sac. Cougar Town remains the quintessential Bill Lawrence show: the casual hangout vibes, the way the group keeps accumulating more ancillary members, the mean-spirited teasing that’s really endearment. When you scratch past the surface of the psychiatric premise of a show like Shrinking, it’s Cougar Town that’s underneath.

“He’s so uniquely talented in the way that he builds out the ensembles in his shows,” says Gravitt, HBO’s executive vice-president for programming and head of HBO and Max comedy series. “They tend to evolve and bounce off of each other in different ways. It takes real skill to be able to do that and nurture each individual performer’s comedic style.” For Gravitt, who was looking to fill the hole left with the end of Bridget Everett’s Somebody Somewhere last year, Lawrence’s ability to capture “real heart and warmth” felt like the only answer. “We always liked the idea of trying to figure out, ‘What is our idea of a family show?’”

This marriage of HBO’s brand of prestige and Emmy voters’ appreciation of Lawrence’s coziness could be the showrunner’s best shot at another Best Comedy Series Emmy this season — and maybe another for Lead Actor, too. Carell is a ten-time nominee portraying the most likeable character he’s played in years. (With Seth Rogen unavailable to repeat as champion, there’s daylight in the Lead Actor category for Carell to run to.) Meanwhile, with eight available nominations in the Comedy Series category (and assuming six will go to Hacks, The Comeback, Only Murders in the Building, Abbott Elementary, The Bear, and Shrinking), Rooster stacks up decently well against the remaining competition. Rooster has …

… a more likeable cast of characters than Nobody Wants This
… fewer genre-based barriers to entry than Widow’s Bay or Wednesday
… less acidic comedy than Big Mistakes
… more premium-cable snob appeal than The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins
… more actual comedy than Margo’s Got Money Troubles
… not already been canceled like Palm Royale

The supporting cast will be harder to parse. Bill Lawrence regulars Phil Dunster (as Carell’s unfaithful son-in-law) and John C. McGinley (as the sauna-loving college president) will probably cannibalize each other in Supporting Actor. In Supporting Actress, Danielle Deadwyler is a good romantic/platonic foil for Carell but is maybe less demonstrably funny than Annie Mumolo, who shines as a batty secretary who’s more substantive than she comes across.

If Rooster and Shrinking can both land nominations, it puts Bill Lawrence at a level that none of his contemporaries have reached. For as much Emmy hardware as has been collected by the likes of Michael Schur, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Tina Fey, Mike Judge, Jenji Kohan, or any of the other comedy auteurs who have accrued multiple nominations and wins, none of them has ever gotten two shows they created into the Comedy Series field in the same year. Lawrence would join a very select group that includes James L. Brooks (The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda in 1975), James Burrows (Cheers and Taxi in 1983), and Greg Daniels (The Office and Parks and Recreation in 2011). Lawrence would essentially be pulling off the TV equivalent of Steven Soderbergh or Francis Ford Coppola getting nominated for Best Picture twice in the same year.

Doesn’t it make perfect sense for Lawrence to exist as an Emmys superlative alongside the creators of TV’s great workplace-as-family shows like Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, and The Office? Perhaps you wouldn’t think to mention Shrinking or Rooster in the same breath as those legendary shows, but every good Bill Lawrence character knows to take life’s odd little quirks as they come.