AMC's Terrific 'Lucky Hank' Is Built to Outlast Its Source Material

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 19, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 19, 2023 |

I am a big fan of Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist upon whose novel, Straight Man, the AMC series Lucky Hank is based. I’d been reading the man’s books for years before I ended up moving to Russo’s hometown while living in a state where many of his novels are set. I therefore could not have been more excited to see one of my favorite novels turned into an AMC series starring — of all people — Saul Goodman himself, Bob Odenkirk.

The show had a number of things going for it coming in — great source material, Odenkirk, Mireille Enos (The Killing), Diedrich Bader (The Drew Carey Show), and Suzanne Cryer (Silicon Valley, Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place) — so the only question was whether Paul Lieberstein could adapt it for television. Lieberstein, recall, was Tobey on The Office, who was also the showrunner for the post-Carell years of the series (interestingly, the decision about who to play Michael Scott on The Office came down to Steve Carell and Bob Odenkirk).

I’ll concede that I was hesitant about the series based on the pilot, if only because the premiere episode takes the major storyline of Straight Man and essentially disposes of it in the first episode, leaving most of the best parts out. The second episode, however, clues us into why: Lucky Hank is not a straightforward adaptation of Straight Man, it’s an adaptation of the characters. Moments from the novel are liberally sprinkled throughout the series, but it’s not meant to be a limited series: Lucky Hank is more of an episodic dramatic comedy with plenty of room to expand into multiple seasons.

That’s good because, based on the first two episodes, I’m looking forward to potentially spending several seasons with these characters. Odenkirk plays William Henry Devereaux Jr. or Hank, a sort of washed-up novelist turned tenured professor at a mediocre school, West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, Pennsylvania (Hank is loosely based on Russo’s own college teaching experiences). Hank is the head of the English department, bitter because he no longer writes, jealous of the father who has always overshadowed him, and married to a woman, Lily Devereaux (Enos), whom he absolutely does not deserve.

The university, meanwhile, is peopled with most of the same characters we know from the novel: Oscar Nunez (another The Office alum) plays the beleaguered Dean of the school while Hank’s fellow college professors are played by the likes of Bader (his character is also Hank’s best friend), a poetry teacher who loathes Hank played by Cryer, and Nancy Robertson’s drunken Professor Quigley, who has been gender-swapped from the novel. Odenkirk — who is neither Jimmy nor Saul here — is well-cast as the surly and insecure professor. All the professors are great ( I’m particularly fond of Cedric Yarbrough from Speechless), and I can’t say enough about Mireille Enos’s Lily. One of the benefits of not being married to the source material is that Mireille Enos is not reduced to a side character in the life of Hank: She gets her own stories, too, as a high-school teacher in a school filled with troubled teens. I loved her character and often found myself wishing she was more prominent in the book instead of off visiting her father.

Once it becomes obvious that Lucky Hank is going to be loyal to the spirit of Russo’s novel and not the novel itself, the series settles into what feels like a comfortable groove with plenty of space to expand and grow. Fans of Sandra Oh’s The Chair on Netflix will probably find much to like in Lucky Hank, particularly those with a fondness for the comedy of academia. There is certainly plenty of fodder, from the interpersonal relationships between the prickly professors, the annoying students, the university politics, and eventually, I’m sure, the student/professor romances that are practically endemic to academic institutions.

Lucky Hankscreened at the 2023 SXSW Film & TV Festival. It premieres on AMC on March 19th.