Lucky Hank, for which Russo serves as an executive producer, is quite aware of this, and has made some deft updates to the novel in response. He’s thawing out in 2023, and he’s suffering from freezer burn. It’s as if the protagonist of Russo’s novel has been frozen for decades and transported across genres and years onto our screen, and finds that the times have changed, though he has not. During this moment of stark political partisanship, university campuses and classrooms are ideal stages on which to dramatize the collision of old and new mores.
But in Lucky Hank, Odenkirk’s character is depicted as a dinosaur-a sympathetic dinosaur, perhaps, but a fossil nonetheless.Ī lot has happened in American culture and its microcosm, the college campus, in the quarter century since Straight Man was published.
In the novel, William Henry Devereaux is portrayed as a no-nonsense buttress against academic silliness and bureaucratic malfeasance.
He’s a caricature of the lefty professor-a counterpoint to Hank’s old guard. The story ridicules a male colleague of Devereaux’s who reflexively tacks on “or she” whenever a colleague uses “he” as an ungendered pronoun, earning him the nickname “Orshee.” He wears his thinning hair in a ponytail, teaches sitcoms instead of books, and doesn’t permit his students to write essays (they shoot videos instead). The show is adapted from Richard Russo’s 1997 campus-comedy novel, Straight Man, whose protagonist sees himself as a representative of sanity in an academic world consumed by political correctness. (Railton, which Hank mockingly dubs “mediocrity’s capital,” is no Columbia.) Johann Strauss’s Waltz of the Emperor plays over the brief scene at the pond, but if Hank’s an emperor, he’s Napoleon-exiled on Elba and bereft. has just announced his retirement from Columbia University, prompting a midlife crisis in his son. His career has been a disappointment, especially when held up against that of his celebrated father and namesake: The preeminent literary critic of his generation, Hank Sr. If Hank is in any sense “lucky,” he’s unconvinced of the fact. This figure, as we learn over the course of the first episode, is William Henry Devereaux Jr., or “Hank” (played by Bob Odenkirk), the chair of the English department at the fictional Railton College. He stands alone, looking across the campus pond-but mostly, it seems, looking inward. You guessed it: He’s a college professor. In the opening shot of AMC’s series Lucky Hank, the camera approaches from behind and encircles a bearded, middle-aged man wearing a tweed jacket, satchel slung over his right shoulder.
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