![]() “There’s more promise in a senior citizen’s yoga class.” Helped by a killer supporting cast “You can’t help these kids,” Odenkirk’s Devereaux tells one adjunct professor, who aspires to join the tenured, full-time faculty. 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. 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. These days, I have a low threshold for TV centered on entitled jerks who don’t realize how privileged their lives are. ![]() 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. Worse, he’s also overshadowed by his famous, more accomplished novelist/professor father, who abandoned Devereaux and his mother. 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. 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. But Odenkirk offers a next-level turn as William Henry Devereaux, Jr., a professor - and English department chair - who feels trapped at the underfunded, mediocre (also fictional) Railton College, surrounded by underperforming students and dysfunctional colleagues. It’s true, we’ve seen these kinds of stories before (Sandra Oh - another virtuoso of the exasperated everywoman role - just clocked her own masterful performance in Netflix’s 2021 comedy The Chair). Making a life’s unraveling seem entertaining ![]() He’s trying to make us all care about an entitled, sarcastic, painfully self-aware English professor. And why we rooted for him as drug lawyer Saul Goodman in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.īut even a performer who got legions of fans to sympathize with a ruthless drug lawyer-in-the-making that unintentionally railroaded his brother into suicide and got an innocent man murdered, may face the ultimate challenge in his latest series for AMC, Lucky Hank. It’s the reason why his turn as a hitman-in-schlub’s clothing worked so well in the film Nobody. ![]()
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