Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lucky Hank’ On AMC, Where Bob Odenkirk Is An English Professor Having A Mid-Life Meltdown

We knew that the first show that Bob Odenkirk did after Better Call Saul ended would get scrutinized, but we also know that Odenkirk’s track record has been pretty good in the last 15 years or so. His new AMC series is more comedic than Saul, but still has some elements of melancholy and drama. But how much of each is there?

LUCKY HANK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A bearded man looks plaintively at a pond while choral music plays.

The Gist: William Henry Devereaux, Jr. (Bob Odenkirk) is the chair of the English department at Railton College in Pennsylvania. Suffice to say, he’s having a hard time, especially since his famous father retired from his position at a more prestigious college, and the way Hank found out is from a splashy article in The New York Times.

In a writing class, he spaces out as a student named Barto (Jackson Kelly) reads his passage; when he asks Hank for a true critique, Hank tries to deflect to the class, but all anyone can say is “I loved it.” Hank certainly didn’t; he runs through a litany of criticisms that Barto pushes back on. As Barto pushes back, comparing himself to Chaucer, Hank stands up and starts ranting that Barto isn’t going to be Chaucer “because you’re here”, meaning Railton, which he calls “mediocrity’s capital.” By the way, he includes himself in that mediocrity, having written a single novel many years ago.

Of course, news of the rant rockets around campus and ends up at the school newspaper’s website. He has to field texts from the people in his department as well as his buddy Tony Conigula (Diedrich Bader). His wife Lily (Mireille Enos), a high school vice principal,disagrees with Hank that adulthood is “80 percent misery.” She thinks it’s more like 30, which he finds impossible.

Back on campus, Barto seeks an written apology, which Hank won’t give. The professors in his department are mixed on his outburst. His biggest rival, Gracie DuBois (Suzanne Cryer), is ready to convene a vote to de-chair him, while Paul Rourke (Cedric Yarbrough) seems to support the outburst. Or maybe he’s just doing that to be argumentative with Gracie.

Hank’s boss, Dean Rose (Oscar Nuñez), doesn’t have a ton of power to do much in the way of discipline, but he does have to field the complaints from Barto’s parents as well as Gracie. Hank tells Lily he’s untouchable because of tenure, but Lily replies that “having tenure doesn’t mean you can’t get punched in the mouth.”

He hears about the de-chairing vote from Billie (Nancy Robertson), one of his old friends in the department, so he sits in on the vote. He’s voted out, but barely. He’s almost relieved. He tells Lily to think about the job offer she got in New York and see if the position is still open. She does, and she gets excited, only for Hank to tell her that his life is here.

On top of everything else, their daughter Julie (Olivia Scott Welch) comes over to ask for money so her boyfriend Russell (Daniel Doheny) can take advantage of an exciting opportunity. Hank suggests that he “took a less interesting job that paid right away.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Lucky Hank, based on the book Straight Man by Richard Russo, reminds us more than a little of Sandra Oh’s recent series The Chair.

Our Take: Lucky Hank has an interesting combination of showrunners behind it: Paul Lieberstein of The Office and Aaron Zelman of The Killing (Odenkirk is also an executive producer, as well as Peter Farrelly, who directed the first episode). The show certainly leans on the comedic side of the ledger, but there are more than enough moments of melancholy to ensure that the show has some balance.

Odenkirk actually plays things a bit more low key than he has in most of his other roles, including Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Even purely comedic roles, like his many sitcom guest roles or the sketches he and David Cross wrote on Mr. Show, showed the brash, in-your-face side of Odenkirik’s comedy. Here, Odenkirk is playing Hank’s meltdown as something real, where Hank’s outward persona still seems relatively calm, but he’s starting to crack up inside. It’s an aspect of his performance range that we’ve never really seen before, but given how he’s been playing Saul/Jimmy McGill for most of the past 13 years, a role with comedic and dramatic extremes, the down-the-middleness of Hank’s rage is refreshing.

We do like how the ensemble is pretty well established. We like that we see Enos holding her own against Odenkirk, with Lily’s positivity trying to overcome her husband’s misery. At her job, she uses French chocolates to keep two parents whose kids are at odds from talking so she can offer a compromise, but is frustrated when she’s told she should have meted out harsher discipline. She’s ready to move on with her life and career, and it’s going to be interesting to see how she rails against Hank’s continued misery, even though it seems he’s doing little to nothing to change the circumstances that are making him miserable.

We do love the Greek chorus that is the English department at Railton. Cryer steps out of her usual uptight character profile, but just a bit, playing a poet who claims her one self-published book from the ’90s has become “the benchmark in early feminist 18th century response poetry.” That’s like when we once considered ourselves “one of the premiere recappers of How I Met Your Mother,” which means absolutely nothing. Yarbrough is a good counterpoint to Cryer, and Robertson is funny as the older professor who gives little to no shit about what’s going on.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Hank tells Lily as she’s anger-running that they voted him back as chair (he got 2 votes, everyone else only got 1). As he looks around, we hear the Bee Gees song “I Started A Joke.” As the lyrics state, the joke may really be on him at this point.

Sleeper Star: We only see Bader in one scene as Hank’s buddy Tony, but he’s funny as usual, stating how attractive he is to the opposite sex. Arthur Keng and Alvina August are Teddy and June Washington-Chen, married English professors who like to scheme in the background, and Shannon DeVido is Emma Wheemer, a film studies professor who seems to be a stickler for parliamentary procedure. Finally, Haig Sutherland is Finny, a professor who likes to abstain from just about any strong opinion, but “throws away” his vote on Hank for department chair.

Most Pilot-y Line: “One day I’m going to meet an English professor who understands that the world is full of people and ideas,” Rose says to Gracie, who thinks the school president is convening an emergency meeting about her accidentally hitting Hank with her notebook.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Lucky Hank is a funny show with a fine cast. We hope it keeps its light tone as Hank’s life falls to pieces, at least the way he’s perceiving that it is.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.