Lucky Hank tells the tale of the dissolutioned middle-aged English professor Hank Devereaux, Jr., played by Bob Odenkirk, who’s beginning to feel the weight of his life decisions.

Lucky Hank (S1:E1 – Pilot)

The pilot episode introduces us to Hank’s life and those within it. Chair of a middling English department at a second-rate university, he’s universally disliked by peers and students alike. He’s married to a perfect woman who’s had enough of him, and he’s a so-so father, as well as a son to a vastly more successful father who abandoned him when Hank was only 14 years of age.

Understandably, Hank is a miserable man who has given up on life. Unfortunately, his commitment to misery isn’t full enough to be interesting, and that seems to be the show’s modus operandi. The writers are unable, or unwilling to pick a lane. Neither the premise, the characters, nor the dialogue is zany enough to be a parody or farce, nor is it solemn enough to be a serious drama. Instead, in its effort to walk the line and be all things, it ends up being nothing.

It is a show consisting of unlikeable characters who are in an unlikable profession at an unlikable place of work. Not even the prodigious talent of Bob Odenkirk is enough to save the pilot episode from this ennui gone bad.

However, it is the pilot episode and it is Bob Odenkirk. Also, the creators and writers mostly have pretty good pedigrees. So, I’ll give it one more episode to see if it’s worth continuing with the series.

WOKE ELEMENTS

• In a complete 180° from every other TV comedy, Hank is a bad father and husband whose wife is smarter, wiser, and better in every way than him…oh, wait, that’s exactly like nearly every other series that’s been on TV for the last twenty years.

Lucky Hank (S1:E2 – George Saunders)

This was a moderate improvement over its predecessor. The pacing was punchier and the emotional through-line was more identifiable, making Odenkirk’s Hank a more sympathetic character. It’s unfortunate then, that the show continues to be suffering from an identity crisis.

It boasts some incredible comedic talent both in front of and behind the camera: veteran comedy writers from The Office, The Bernie Mac Show, and The King of The Hill, 50% of the Farrelly brothers directed the first two episodes, and the cast includes Diedrick Bader and Cedric Yarbrough.

How is it then, that it’s such a boring and unfunny program? It’s as though those involved are intentionally trying to make it pretentious just to prove that they can, and just when you think you can’t take it anymore, there’s a random (and unfunny) d!@k joke tossed in.

I recently saw Bob Odenkirk on Hot Ones, and he mentions how  “exhausting” it was to inhabit the mind of  Saul Goodman for six seasons and, by contrast, what a relief Hank Devereaux is, ostensibly due to the character’s simplicity and lower energy.

Weeeellll, that’s kind of a problem. The show is filled with uninteresting characters suffering from everyday problems suffered by those of us in the real world. So if its lead character is also realistically bland and uninteresting, why would anyone want to watch it? Most of us watch TV in an effort to escape reality, going full-realtard only serves to remind us of our own tedious lives.

That being said, Bob Odenkirk’s past brilliance in conjunction with some hints of Lucky Hank’s trajectory provided by this episode will keep me plugged in for at least one more. However, I highly suggest that, if you haven’t yet started this series, you let me take the next one for the team. Right now, Lucky Hank isn’t worth a whole lot.

WOKE ELEMENTS

It’s a show about the English Department in a modern American University, so it’s amazing that it took this long for them to hit us with this stuff.

• One of the male teachers likes his very loud American muscle cars and, because he is a man, he likes to rev his loudly for everyone to hear. No, you don’t understand, he really really likes it…like a lot.
• The phrase, “Sometimes the male brain isn’t developed enough to recognize its cruelty” is said with utter sincerity and accepted as absolute truth.
• There’s one that some might want me to ding but I would argue is actually a joke at the expense of the woke.
  • Two women (one of which is very butch) have RBG bumper stickers on their cars. Both cars are green Subaru Outbacks.
    • This is clearly poking fun at Leftist groupthink.

Lucky Hank (S1:E3 – Escape)

For all of its flaws, I think that there might be a show here that is worth watching. In this episode, the secondary characters were given very limited screen time, which gave us more time with Hank. As anyone who has watched Mr. Show, Breaking Bad, or Better Call Saul knows, more screen time with Bob Odenkirk is a good thing.

However, it’s doubly good in this series because its biggest problem in the first two episodes was its lack of identity. It didn’t know if it was a screwball comedy or a serious yet sarcastic drama, and it unsuccessfully tried to be both. By excluding the ill-defined supporting cast, the show’s direction and focus were made sharper. Furthermore, this episode was much more emotionally accessible, featuring themes that extend beyond the elitist of academia.

That being said, the series still has quite a bit of tightening up to do. There was still some goofball music playing in a scene that didn’t warrant it, and the seemingly random voiceover needs to either stop or commit and become much more prevalent. In either case, it’s not working right now, as it comes out of nowhere. Furthermore, the writers need to decide if we should be laughing at the students or identifying with their grievances because, as it stands right now, they are obnoxious and ridiculous but taken seriously.

As it stands, they are getting another episode out of me, but I strongly suggest that you wait to watch until I’m done with the series unless it suddenly leaps ahead in quality. In its current state, it’s still not worth starting.

WOKE ELEMENTS

• Bob Odenkirk’s character’s wife continues to be the sane put together woman in a world of ineffectual buffoon males. This time it’s the janitor and principal of her school. Were the series to have a single competent man in its regular lineup, perhaps the laughs that these characters are intended to illicit would land.

Lucky Hank (S1:E4 – The Goose Boxer)

Despite myself, Lucky Hank is beginning to grow on me, which really stinks because I don’t actually like it. Most of the supporting characters are still trash and need cut. So, when the last episode’s main subplot was about Hank needing to cut a quarter of his department and his seeming ambivalence toward it, I was immediately on board. Regrettably, that was all undone with this episode, and it looks like the series will be keeping them for the time being.

So, how is it that I can make the claim that a show that I don’t like is growing on me? The answer is actually pretty simple: Bob Odenkirk. He’s managed to make me care about Hank’s well-being and growth as a person, despite the fact that I don’t like anybody else in the series (Diedrich Bader notwithstanding) or care about a single thing that happens at the school, Odenkirk keeps me going.

That being said, it’s still not a worthwhile program to start, and I’m not convinced that it ever will be. However, I’m halfway through the season so far, so I might as well stick it out. Stay tuned to see if you should tune in.

WOKE ELEMENTS

• Hank’s wife openly and knowingly flirts with her ex-lover but dares to balk at the kiss that she receives after hours of holding hands and familiar caresses. The line between the two is utterly arbitrary.
• There has been a lot of schlocky bloating about the benefits of unions (specifically teachers’ unions), however, it’s been mostly dismissed as ridiculous, until the end of this episode.
• The motivation for Hank’s sudden change of mind about not cutting his faculty comes when he learns that the school spent the money on a new technologies building. It’s been made more than apparent, with Hank and his wife going so far as to out and out say it, that most of Hank’s staff is a worthless drain of resources. Furthermore, Universities are businesses, and businesses have to make the best decisions for their own health and growth. The school paying for 1/5th of a building that will help them stay competitive and that will help their students to succeed in today’s technology-driven world seems like a wise and responsible decision. Also, in Hank’s first scene of the first episode, he rants about the mediocrity of the school, so I fail to see how cutting the fat while simultaneously improving the curriculum isn’t in total lockstep with the character. It’s almost as though a bunch of liberal writers couldn’t see past their own bs biases.

Lucky Hank (S1:E5 – The Clock)

The Clock takes place almost completely during an annual dinner party for the university’s English department. As the chair of the department, Hank and his wife host it at their house. So, we are treated to 45 minutes of the most banal English department in North America (and that’s saying something). Fortunately, the setting is perfect for making the audience as uncomfortable as the cast, which is the point. Blessedly, it works.

Episode 5 is the first of the series to actually be good. It has the clearest and most focused theme and plot, as well as the most consistent and satisfying emotional through-line. However, even though the show may have finally found itself, the primary problems still exist.

The series centers on a middling English department within a mediocre university located in a mundane town. So, with all that boring in one’s show, it would probably be a good idea to include interesting characters. They did not.

The only profession with less utility than an English professor would have to be a poetry professor. This show has two of them, and, while it’s aware that they are jokes, the jokes surrounding them almost always fall flat, with the writers unwilling to commit to their mediocrity. In fact, the only character worth a damn, other than those played by Bob Odenkirk and Diedrich Bader, is Shannon DeVido’s Emma, and that’s because she seems to be the only character who understands how useless both she and everyone else is. Also, she has a wonderfully dry delivery that gives her character an amount of charm that is sorely missing from most of the rest of the cast.

While I’m happy to no longer feel as though I’m subjecting myself to torture, I’m still not able to recommend this series as Worth it.

WOKE ELEMENTS

• The married couple within the English Department are swingers and, much like the rest of the series’s thematic ambiguity, it’s impossible to tell if the show is treating it like the awkward and gross joke that it is, or celebrating it. This being Hollywood, I’m erring on the side of it being woke.
• Hank continues to be the only one in his marriage that needs to work on himself, even though his wife recently kissed another man/was kissed by another man, and liked it.

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