Matt Tarses has spent thirty years in the writers' rooms of fast-talking American ensemble comedies, Sports Night and Scrubs among them. The series he runs himself, Rooster most recently, have the pace and the warmth of those rooms and not yet the people.
Fi1m perspective
Somebody in a Matt Tarses comedy is always at work and always talking about something else. The newsroom in Sports Night, the hospital in Scrubs, the campus in Rooster: the setting supplies the deadlines and the characters supply the talk, fast, overlapping and usually funnier than whatever prompted it. It is a durable way to make television. When the talk is quick enough, nobody has to notice that the people doing it have not changed since the pilot.
He came up in the mid-to-late 1990s on Public Morals, Men Behaving Badly and Norm, then landed on Sports Night (1998), where he wrote nine episodes and produced on it through 2000. From 2001 he wrote eight episodes of Scrubs and co-executive produced it until 2005. Those are the two writers' rooms that made him, and they are the two shows we rate. We scored Sports Night 82 and did not mention him, which is not a slight: on a show with a voice that strong, the staff writers succeed by disappearing into it. What a writer learns there is pace, and how to let a joke and a hurt land in the same breath.
The question is what he does with those lessons when the show is his. Mad Love (2011) was the first series he created, Alex, Inc. (2018) the second, and most critics were lukewarm about the latter. Then came Rooster (2026), created with Bill Lawrence, his collaborator on two shows now, and starring Steve Carell. We gave it 57. Carell is appealingly awkward and the cast keep him good company, but the jokes are ones we had heard before, and the relationship the whole thing rests on, a father and his daughter, is barely written. We liked being in the company of these people, and then noticed we could not say what the daughter wanted from her father, or he from her, and that the programme had not noticed either. The stories wander before anyone has enough of a life for the wandering to matter.
That is the honest shape of the career so far: a first-rate staff writer whose own series move like the shows he learned on and are not yet about anyone in particular. Rooster is easy company, and easy company is not nothing on a weeknight. But Sports Night was funny about people who were plainly in trouble, and the trouble was the point; Rooster is funny near people who might be in trouble if the script stopped to ask. Watch Sports Night for what he learned. Watch Rooster for Carell. The next one he runs should take a scene off from the jokes and find out what somebody wants.
Biography
Matt Tarses is an American writer and producer. He wrote episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990) and served as co-producer and writer on Sports Night (1998–2000). He wrote eight episodes of Scrubs (2001–2005) and was co-executive producer for 80 episodes of the series.
Tarses wrote the screenplay for the film A Guy Thing (2003). He has written for and produced series including Teachers (2006), Worst Week (2008), Mad Love (2011), The Goldbergs (2013), Alex, Inc. (2018), Bad Monkey (2024) and Rooster (2026), which he co-created with Bill Lawrence. He has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and has won two Humanitas Prizes.
