This could be a recipe for annoyance if anyone other than Odenkirk was playing Devereaux — a damaged, bitter guy who can’t help stepping in personal land mines he sets for himself. As viewers quickly learn, he’s struggling with crippling writer’s block, which set in not long after he wrote a well-regarded novel decades ago. Worse, he’s also overshadowed by his famous, more accomplished novelist/professor father, who abandoned Devereaux and his mother.
Odenkirk’s likability and ease with a punchline keeps viewers engaged in Devereaux’s story, even as we learn he’s got a beautiful, smart, equally-self aware wife and a supportive friend/boss that he probably doesn’t deserve.
These days, I have a low threshold for TV centered on entitled jerks who don’t realize how privileged their lives are. But Lucky Hank avoids that pitfall by playing up the absurdity of academia, college life and educational bureaucracy in a way that makes almost everyone look both bone-headed and long-suffering.
In other words — to distort a phrase — just because these characters are self-sabotaging and often self-involved, that doesn’t mean the system they’re stuck in isn’t also a moronic, life-sucking enterprise that doesn’t constantly fail them.
“You can’t help these kids,” Odenkirk’s Devereaux tells one adjunct professor, who aspires to join the tenured, full-time faculty. “There’s more promise in a senior citizen’s yoga class.”
Helped by a killer supporting cast
Odenkirk is aided in this quirky enterprise by an ace supporting cast, which includes The Killing alum Mireille Enos as the aforementioned wife Lily, The Office alum Oscar Nunez as the buddy/boss Dean Rose, Drew Carey Show alum Diedrich Bader as another buddy/colleague Tony and Kyle MacLachlan as Railton’s president, Dickie Pope.
They’re all playing characters — with maybe the exception of MacLachlan’s rigid…
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