I've watched the "Forks" episode of The Bear just under a dozen times. I'm not entirely sure what that says about me, but I suspect it says something.
For those who haven't seen it: Richie, a volatile and largely rudderless man, gets sent to stage at a three-Michelin-star restaurant as a kind of punishment. His assignment is to dry forks. He is furious. He is humiliated. And then, slowly, something shifts. He stops trying to dominate the room and starts trying to understand it. By the end of the episode, he has found something he didn't know he was looking for.
HBO's new series Rooster, from the creators of Ted Lasso and Shrinking, appears to be operating in the same territory. Steve Carell plays a celebrated novelist who arrives to rescue his daughter and ends up, predictably, needing rescuing himself. The premise is almost beside the point. What matters is what the show is actually about: a man whose carefully constructed identity turns out to be negotiable.
This is a pattern now. Ted Lasso. Richie and his forks. Whatever Carell's character is working through in Rooster. Television has quietly retired the angry genius archetype that defined prestige drama for twenty years. Don Draper is not coming back. Gregory House is not coming back. The brilliant, caustic, fundamentally furious man as protagonist has given way to something quieter and, frankly, harder to write: men doing the interior work.
The easy read is that this is culture softening. I don't think that's right. What I see is something more interesting: a willingness to let male characters fail without swagger, grow without conquest narratives, and sit with discomfort without immediately trying to solve or escape it. That's not softness. That's a different kind of difficulty.
Whether television is reflecting or modeling a cultural shift is unclear to me. Probably both. But I find myself thinking about what this means outside the screen, in the rooms where actual decisions get made. Boardrooms. Founding teams. Investment committees. The professional cultures most of us inhabit were built on versions of the Don Draper model, even when we would never say so out loud. Competence is performed as dominance. Uncertainty is treated as a weakness. Identity as a fixed and defended position rather than a thing that is, as it turns out, negotiable.
If the stories a culture tells itself matter, and I believe they do, then something is being proposed here. Not a replacement for ambition or rigor, but a different relationship to the self doing the work.
Which brings me to the question I can't stop turning over: If the most compelling version of leadership is no longer the man who dominates the room but the one who is willing to be changed by it, what does that ask of the institutions and cultures we've spent the last twenty years building?
-Marc
+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point. More @ www.brigadoon.live.
March 24, 2026
