Bob Odenkirk plays it down the middle in the TV series Lucky Hank
Daniel Ross Goodman
You can’t get any more “mittelmaßig,” or middling, as Thomas Mann would have described him, than Hank, the protagonist of the new show Lucky Hank. “Hank” is the middle nickname of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., a middle-aged English professor at the midpoint of his career in a middling college in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. As a teacher, he is tired and apathetic, doing only the minimum to keep his classes humming along. As a scholar, he is unremarkable, having published little of note. As a writer, he was once promising but has not written a single thing since his first novel came out years ago. As an adviser, he can barely be made to follow through on the letter of recommendation he’d promised to write for one of his students. And as a father, he appears to do just as much as he needs to skate by as well. And as a son, let’s just say Dr. “please-don’t-call-me-‘junior’” Devereaux has got some major daddy issues.
If you presented this character description to the public and asked if it would be interested in watching a movie or TV series about such a person, the vast majority of people (including myself) would politely shake their heads and wonder how and why such a series could even get made. But if you were to tell them that this character is being played by the Emmy-winning Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk and the show is aired on AMC? “Well, why didn’t you say so! Where can I watch it?!” And they’d be right. Odenkirk’s charisma makes the difference between a predictable, cliche-ridden show we’d lose interest in and one that leaves us Googling “Lucky Hank season 2 release when.”
KERI RUSSELL SAVES THE DIPLOMAT FROM ITSELF
Lucky Hank is set at the fictional Railton College, the English department of which is populated by all the sorts of stereotypical people you might expect at a small liberal arts school in the 21st century. Vainglorious teachers believe their monographs of feminist critiques on early 17th-century English literature are the best thing since 90-second microwavable bags of quinoa. Supercilious Gen-Z students demand an apology if a professor says they need to work rather than just be praised. Grad students tend bar after finishing their dissertations and pine for that first full-time job. The infighting faculty is only made more bitter because budget cuts are coming for the non-STEM departments, threatening layoffs in the English department.
It may seem like it’d be hard for you, as a viewer, to relate to anyone. But Odenkirk is able to play Hank as an ornery outsider to his own life, and you want to be there with him. The key to what makes Hank so “lucky,” as well as so easy to root for, is his dry humor. It starts when a particularly self-serious student irritates Hank enough to get him to let loose some (as the kids would say) real talk: Railton is nothing more than a “middling college,” and the unexceptional student is nothing more than a part of what has allowed the school to become “mediocrity’s capital.” Anyone even remotely familiar with universities in the 21st century knows what happens next: A student demands a professor’s apology. The school newspaper runs an article about the incident. The dean confronts the professor using language built as a sort of trap. The professor faces disciplinary action. Finally, the professor is de-chaired.
Which, you might ask, is what, exactly? “’De-chaired.’ I think it’s an outpatient procedure these days,” Hank quips. But his de-chairing turns out only to be a temporary condition. The series, based on the novel Straight Man by Richard Russo, at this point could have easily gone the way of campus novels such as J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace or Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, chronicling the misadventures of a small liberal arts college professor whose life spirals out after a generational culture clash with students. But Russo and a talented writing team give us, instead, a fun, erudite, occasionally poignant series firmly grounded in the contemporary college campus that satirizes campus life through its lovably cantankerous main character. Lucky for Hank — even luckier for us.
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.