Roosters Season 2 on Netflix is about what happens when four Dutch men learn to be softer and nobody else got the memo

Somewhere between Season 1 and Season 2, Mike, Daan, Greg and Ivo did the homework. They sat in the circle, named the feeling, wrote the letter to the inner child, learned the vocabulary that polite Dutch dinner parties have started to expect from men in their forties. They came home holding something fragile. Roosters Season 2 is what happens next — which is that holding a fragile thing in public is a different skill from picking it up in private.

The show has stopped being about men taking a course. It is about a country pretending it has already taken one. Where Season 1 mined comedy from the awkwardness of the workshop room — the eye contact exercises, the apology rehearsals, the men flinching at words their fathers never said — Season 2 moves the cameras into the kitchens and offices and parent-teacher meetings where the new vocabulary is supposed to land. The cringe no longer comes from Mike trying to say ‘I felt rejected’ without flinching. It comes from the moment after. His wife answers with logistics. His boss schedules him out of the room he asked to be heard in. Ivo’s friends try the words back at him and discover that nothing in their daily lives has been redesigned to receive them. The men finished the course. The Netherlands around them has not.

That gap between learning and being is the season’s argument and its engine. The writing room, run by Richard Kemper and Luuk van Bemmelen with the Spanish ‘Machos alfa’ template as a floor plan, refuses to give the audience a redemption arc. There is no episode where the men get it right and the camera pans across approving faces. The show instead runs the same beat — a man tries the new vocabulary — through four protagonists in parallel, each receiving a different consequence. Daan tries the softer line and his wife relaxes. Greg tries it and his teenage daughter calls him out for performing. Mike tries it at work and walks into the kind of corporate compliment that hands you a plant and a smaller portfolio. Ivo tries it and the silence is worst of all — nobody picks up. The same gesture, four returns. The architecture tells the viewer something the dialogue never has to: the variable is not the man, it is the environment.

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Anna van der Heide and Anna van Keimpema direct the season the way they directed the first one, with a patience that reads as confidence. The camera holds on a beat after the joke a louder comedy would cut. The held silence is the directing signature, and the performances are calibrated for that delay. Jeroen Spitzenberger plays Mike with a corporate man’s micro-flinch — the half-second of calculation before he says the new line. Waldemar Torenstra gives Daan a residual swagger he cannot quite drop, even mid-sentence about emotional labour. André Dongelmans and Benja Bruijning carry the season’s tonal balance, oscillating between earnest and ridiculous within a single take, the way Pupkin’s house style has trained Dutch ensemble actors to do since Oogappels and De Luizenmoeder. The decision to shoot in domestic interiors with available light — kitchens lit by the window rather than the lamp — locks the comedy into a register of ordinary Dutch realism. This is your living room, the camera says, not a sitcom set.

Around the four leads, the supporting cast does the load-bearing work the men cannot. Jennifer Hoffman, Jelka van Houten, Fockeline Ouwerkerk and Eva Laurenssen build partners who are not props for the men’s growth but characters with their own decade-old resentment, their own fatigue at having to be the witness as well as the wife. The season is honest that ‘softer’ arriving home is also a new domestic labour to host. Frouke Verheijde, as Greg’s daughter Tess, anchors a younger generation that watches the men’s effort with a phone half up and a precise read on which parts are sincere and which are performance. The new arrivals for Season 2 — Peter Blok and Tanja Jess in particular — bring an older generation into the room: the boomer father, the colleague who never went to a workshop, the version of Dutch masculinity that did not get the rewrite and is not asking for one. Sarah Chronis, Freek Bartels, Bo Maerten, Bas Hoeflaak, Kendrick Etmon and Claire Bender widen the ensemble around them. The friction between the two registers is where the season finds its sharpest comedy and its quietest sadness.

Roosters is metabolising a real social weather system. Pollsters across the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and the United States keep reporting the same shape: young men have moved one way on gender, young women the other, and the gap has widened faster than any institution has built a bridge for it. The masculinity-coach business has gone from punchline to industry. Corporate HR has learned the vocabulary; corporate org charts have not. Workshops sell out. Promotions do not change shape. The show sits in that lag. Its central trick is that it refuses to flatter either side. The wives are not villains for being tired; the men are not heroes for trying; the new vocabulary is not a scam, but it is not yet a system either. The course-leader figure Bram, mostly off-screen this season, is neither charlatan nor saint. He is a man who has built a viable business teaching a language, and the season is honest that the language helps and that nobody has built the part where the world receives it.

What Roosters inherits from the Spanish ‘Machos alfa’ original is the architecture — four men, one coach, one workshop, structured around the gap between learning and being. What it inherits from the Dutch lineage that runs through Oogappels and De Luizenmoeder is the register: held silences, real domestic interiors, deadpan Northern European discomfort instead of broad Mediterranean physical comedy. What it breaks from both, more clearly in Season 2 than in Season 1, is the redemption arc. The Spanish original tilts toward warm resolution. The Dutch domestic-comedy tradition tilts toward gentle catharsis. Roosters refuses both. The refusal is the season’s argument.

It is also the engine of a different kind of audience contract. Netflix’s marketing leans on the promise that this is a feel-good comedy about men learning to be better. That promise is precisely what the show does not deliver. What the audience contracts to watch is a redemption arc with laughs. What the show actually delivers is an audit of who pays for the change and who pockets the gain. The gap between contract and delivery is where the meaning lives. A viewer who came for the cathartic ‘men get better and the world rewards them’ will sit through eight episodes of softer men taking smaller meetings, of partners who wanted vulnerability and now have to host it nightly, of friend groups slowly tilting in their seating arrangements. The show does not punish the audience for showing up with the wrong expectation. It reroutes them. By the back half of the season the viewer is no longer watching for redemption. They are watching for honesty.

The systemic read sits underneath all of this. A Dutch-language scripted comedy with no English-language route to global audiences was pre-renewed two weeks after Season 1 launched — the fastest renewal of a Dutch original on the platform. The decision confirms Netflix’s strategic priority in 2026: local-language scripted comedy as a churn-defence asset in non-English markets, not as an export ambition. The platform needs to keep a Dutch household subscribing in February and a Spanish household subscribing in November, and a national-comedy slate does that better than another global tentpole. Roosters is built for that role and built well for it. It is also, almost incidentally, one of the more honest pieces of writing on the contemporary masculinity question that any platform is currently airing.

And the question the season cannot answer — and is honest enough not to pretend it can — is what ‘doing the work’ is even for, in a society that has not decided whether to reward the man who does it. If the people he loves wanted him softer and the people he answers to want him harder, every choice he makes will betray someone. The teenagers watching with their phones half up will read each version as a performance. The workshops will keep filling. The org charts will not change shape. Roosters does not resolve any of this. It films it, holds the silence two seconds longer than is comfortable, and lets the gap stay open.

Roosters Season 2 streams on Netflix from May 13, 2026, with all eight episodes available at launch. The series is directed by Anna van der Heide and Anna van Keimpema, written by Richard Kemper and Luuk van Bemmelen, and stars Jeroen Spitzenberger, Waldemar Torenstra, André Dongelmans and Benja Bruijning, with Jennifer Hoffman, Jelka van Houten, Fockeline Ouwerkerk, Eva Laurenssen and Frouke Verheijde. New cast for Season 2 includes Peter Blok, Tanja Jess, Sarah Chronis, Freek Bartels, Bo Maerten, Bas Hoeflaak, Kendrick Etmon and Claire Bender. Produced by Pupkin.

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