Here’s a crazy casting idea: Steve Carell as a clueless blunderer unable to grasp even the most rudimentary of social cues. Sure, the former star of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Dinner for Schmucks, and a dozen other variations on the theme has been playing that type for more than 20 years, but supply is still barely keeping up with demand. If, as memory insists, the America of my childhood saw itself as Indiana Jones, cracking whips until the nations fell in line, the anxious generation’s avatar of choice is unquestionably The Office’s Michael Scott.

Carell’s latest schlub is Greg Russo, protagonist of HBO’s new campus dramedy, Rooster. A popular novelist in the James Patterson vein, Greg writes the kind of books in which “the characters you like have sex, [while] the ones you don’t get shot in the face.” As the series opens, our hero is guest-lecturing at New England’s Ludlow College, a liberal-arts institution where his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), teaches. There, persuaded by flaky president Walter Mann (John C. McGinley) to stay on, Greg settles down to a term as visiting writer, unofficial campus mascot, and general meddler in others’ affairs.