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Bob Odenkirk’s return to AMC, just eight months after his show-stopping final season in the network’s masterpiece Better Call Saul, gets off to a worrisome start. As the title character of Lucky Hank—a cranky, bushily bearded, professionally stunted chair of the English department at a fictional liberal arts school called Railton College—he lashes out at a defensive student in his undergrad writing workshop. Railton, “this middling college in this sad, forgotten town,” is a “mediocrity capital,” Hank seethes. Word of the rant travels fast, making him a pariah on campus. His position of power in the department is suddenly in jeopardy.
It sounds a lot like Netflix’s 2021 Sandra Oh vehicle The Chair—not to mention every repetitive, nuance-free bit of discourse on “cancel culture” in academia that we’ve had to absorb over the last several years. But thankfully, this adaptation of Richard Russo’s 1997 novel Straight Man, debuting March 19, moves quickly past its exhausting setup, as well as a premiere plagued by stilted dialogue and tonally dissonant slapstick. (We can probably blame the latter on its director, Peter Farrelly.) Delivered with a finely calibrated mix of vitriol and self-loathing, Hank’s diatribe serves mostly to situate the wonderfully expressive Odenkirk at the center of an observant, if slight, character study about an aging author wrestling with his own inertness.
Mireille Enos…
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