Lucky Hank

Your guide to watching Lucky Hank (2023), Bob Odenkirk's exciting new comedy-drama series coming to screens this weekend.

What we are keen to see is what happens to Hank by the end of the season. As per the latest announcements, Lucky Hank is slated for eight episodes, each running for roughly 40 to 60 minutes. So, if you want to (or already have) go cordless, then you can subscribe to the streaming app and watch Lucky Hank from anywhere, anytime, as and when new episodes are released. As we mentioned already, the Lucky Hank premiere will be arriving on AMC+, AMC, BBC America, IFC, and SundanceTV. He always seems to be on the opposite side of things from everyone else and gets into physical altercations and verbal feuds with anyone and everyone who challenges his opinions and behavior. There is also a promo clip titled “Meet Hank” that will give you a good understanding of the character in less than a minute. Ahead of the television premiere, the series had its first screening at the The name of the series was initially the same as the novel but was changed before the release announcement. On that same day, it will also be available for streaming on BBC America, IFC, and Sundance TV. Lucky Hank premieres on AMC on Sunday, March 19, 2023, at 9 p.m. For now, here's, how, when, and where you can watch Lucky Hank. The series focuses on him and how his personality affects everyone around him, in his professional and personal life.

After playing Saul Goodman for 13 years, Bob Odenkirk spoke to Decider about what drew him to 'Lucky Hank' on AMC.

He is funny because we know his character, and we think he is a clown sometimes, which he was,” Odenkirk said. I think this is a big swing that we connected with.” “The funny part is that you’re watching this cage match, it is a cage match of egos. It is like a great home run hitter has the most strikeouts too,” Odenkirk said. In Hank’s world, the way he perceives himself, everybody else is a nut and a clown, and he is the only sane one. Who is going to get the award? And so, in academia, he said, it’s who is going to be the key note speaker? “And this new person, that you have probably never seen, Shannon DeVito, so funny and just steals the screen every time she is on. “So, just playing a guy that is more my age and a relationship situation that I could relate to. That is why they were paired up, that is how they felt connected. After portraying Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul‘s Saul Goodman for nearly 13 years, Odenkirk is moving away from the world of crime and legal betrayals to portray a role that feels more true to who is now. Based on Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, the upcoming AMC show follows William “Hank” Devereaux, Jr., a tenured professor and head of the English department.

We are finally getting our Odenkirk fix because next week, on Sunday, March 19, the prolific actor is back at AMC taking on a new role in the upcoming series ...

The "Better Call Saul" star says the show's delicate balance of comedy and drama gives it "a unique vibe," and he lauds his supporting cast: “I don't know ...

“But we have a secret weapon in Bob Odenkirk,” Zelman adds. Then I leave it to the audience to hopefully pick up on it.” “We didn’t have that luxury,” he says. “He absolutely knows the ways in which he’s falling short and obstinate about not growing. “I had done quite a bit of comedy before that, which usually uses a medium or wide shot with two or three actors,” he says. Many of the show’s funniest lines are fired off by Hank in smart-ass mode as a defense mechanism “because he doesn’t want to be fully present, he wants to push the moment away,” says Odenkirk. The book gets away with it, Lieberstein says, because Hank behaves badly but his narration is thoughtful and humane and he struggles with his flaws. “This cast is insane,” Odenkirk says. Russo, he says, is “people first.” We weren’t getting the spirit of the book in the way that would make a great show until we came up with that scene where Hank challenges the student. Co-creator Paul Lieberstein — a writer and executive producer for “The Office,” who also played Toby Flenderson — notes that if you were describing the novel you wouldn’t start with the plot but would focus instead on the characters. The student had objected (justifiably) to Hank being mentally checked out, but he gets pompous and defensive when Hank finally engages by shredding the student’s writing.

You're in luck Better Call Saul fans. The new dramedy series Lucky Hank starring Bob Odenkirk premieres on Mar. 19 only on AMC network!

Are you excited to see Bob Odenkirk in this new role? Want to see what to expect in the show? The average Bob Odenkirk fan will also appreciate this show, even if they’re still mourning the end of the Breaking Bad spin-off which wrapped up its six season-run on the same network in the summer of 2022.

'Breaking Bad' star Bob Odenkirk is continuing his run of off-beat roles, playing a crabby professor in the new US comedy drama TV series 'Lucky Hank'.

Based on Richard Russo's 1997 novel Straight Man — the show's original title — Lucky Hank stars Odenkirk as William Henry Deveraux, Jr., the dissatisfied chair ...

Enos turns in a commanding performance, but sadly, the second episode shifts away from this storyline and relegates her to a role as Hank’s cheerleader. It doesn’t help that co-creators Aaron Zelman (Silicon Valley) and Paul Lieberstein (The Office) present Lucky Hank as a first-person account of Hank’s existential crisis. The premiere provides a glimpse into Lily’s life not just as Hank’s supportive partner, but as the vice principal at the local high school. In the opening minutes of the premiere, Hank unloads on a student, telling him that if he showed more promise, he wouldn’t be here, at “mediocrity’s capital.” Later, when the tirade threatens his role as department chair, he encourages his wife, Lily (Mireille Enos), to apply for a job in New York, only to raise concerns about “logistics” as soon as things start to go Lily’s way. As other parts of the show flounder, Enos’ Lily emerges as a stabilizing force. While the Emmy-nominated Breaking Bad prequel (turned sequel) came out of the gate fully-formed, Lucky Hank struggles to establish a clear identity in its first two episodes, leaving Odenkirk adrift as his character goes through the motions of a midlife crisis.

As a disillusioned professor on this smart, new AMC series, the actor finds the decency in a deeply cynical character.

Lieberstein was a writer and producer on “The Office” and also played Toby Flenderson. How much time do we want to spend with a guy who’s miserable and often makes those around him feel worse than they did a moment ago? Plus, Hank has a terrific best buddy in Diedrich Bader’s Tony. It’s not that Hank works hard at being unlikable and unhappy. That we’re able to set aside Saul and so quickly welcome one William Henry “Hank” Devereaux Jr. This weekend’s premiere also can be seen on BBC America, IFC and SundanceTV.

Bob Odenkirk ("Better Call Saul") and Mireille Enos ("The Killing") discuss their new comedy and the "drop of hope" it brought to their lives.

"It was so stinking fun to make," Enos says. "Playing that part was hard," Odenkirk says. "She made me laugh, and she had this great smile and this great laugh," he says. Odenkirk says "Hank" came together very quickly as "Saul" was drawing to a close, and the timing "was a shocker to me. "But I was really holding out for something like this, that walks that incredible line between real life and the absurdity and comedy of life." "Lily has fallen into the trap that women who are wives and mothers sometimes fall into, which is making sure everyone's OK," she says. "My daughter wants to sit and watch the things that I've done with me, and she can't!" Most recently, she'd had roles on two Amazon Prime series: War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, on "Good Omens," and a CIA operative on "Hanna." Last year, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in January [ he was feted as 2023 Man of the Year ](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2023/01/19/bob-odenkirk-named-harvard-hasty-pudding-man-year/11084428002/)by Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals, an honor shared by Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman – not bad company, It had been a year since she'd said yes to anything, because she was "really in need of something with a drop of hope," she says. He starts out the eight-episode first season staring down the barrel of a midlife crisis, trying and failing to write his second novel while navigating life with his long-suffering but loving wife Lily, played by Mireille Enos ("The Killing"). "I wanted to do something that was fundamentally different from 'Saul,'" Odenkirk says in an interview.

Odenkirk returns to AMC in the likable new series about a gruff college professor at a crossroads. Lucky Hank premieres March 19.

But if you're willing to sit with the ennui and really give the ensemble a chance, you'll be rewarded with a unique, moving, very human show. [Bob Odenkirk](https://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/bob-odenkirk/3000383077/) has built one hell of a career. Hank has a successful career and a wife, Lily ( [Mireille Enos](https://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/mireille-enos/3000432557/)), who adores him, and he's published one novel to some mild acclaim. [Lucky Hank](https://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/lucky-hank/1060142701/), a series about a college professor who's seriously feeling his middle age. It doesn't take the show long to establish these various characters and their unique tics, and while the overall feeling is that these people who share a campus are all so different, they essentially form their own little community that Hank, despite his occasionally gruff attitude, finds it hard to separate himself from. Mix those feelings with a daughter (

Some of the best television shows are about whip-smart operators and the political nuances of their professional worlds. So why then is it so challenging to ...

That blend of hangout comedy and workplace sitcom is an excellent fit for Lieberstein and Zelman, who worked on “The Office” and “Silicon Valley,” respectively. Office comedies at their best have a ferocious mean streak, with just the occasional hint of sweetness, and “Lucky Hank” captures that balance from the outset. It’s hard to give a full-throated endorsement to a show like “Lucky Hank” after seeing only two episodes, as it’s clearly designed for delayed gratification rather than cheap thrills. Who is Hank to judge the writing of others, Bartow asks, when his only successful novel came out ages ago, and is barely in print? It’s not only difficult to think of a television show that has succeeded in lifting the veil of a university, it’s tough to think of shows that have even tried. Even as college campuses remain a go-to battleground for American culture wars, the inner lives of the professors caught in the crossfire are usually reserved for novels.

I'll get this out of the way now: Lucky Hank, the new academic satire series on AMC, is based on Richard Russo's 1997 novel Straight Man, and no, ...

To that point, I actually don’t know what the title phrase, “Lucky Hank,” is supposed to mean, unless it exists once again to assert that the show’s main motif is sardonicism, to raise an umbrella of sarcasm over a show that constantly forgets that sarcasm is a tool. It’s clear that the show’s most empowering force is the hope for Hank to finally stand up and do what he needs to do. This might seem a little taxing of a tone, so the show tries to balance it by spotlighting less-beaten-down supporting characters in an assortment of B-plots, especially two English professors with a surging feud between them (Cedric Yarbrough and Suzanne Cryer), and Hank’s wife Lily, who is trying to mediate a particularly difficult mire at work. The moment in which an angry poet slaps Hank with her spiral notebook, lodging the wire in his nose, becomes just another reason for Hank to want to lie down in bed and never get up, rather than a riotous office bloodbath. (Not for nothing, the un-George Saunders-ing of George Saunders is the show’s most curious development.) Meanwhile, Hank’s demanding mother, a urination problem, and the brewing department mutiny feed his daily exhaustion and frustration. The exasperating Bartow, who embodies wealthy white male privilege to an extreme, is also given a lot of screen time as he attempts to cook up a scheme to get Hank fired. He has long-ago accepted his own mediocrity, and is weary of teaching pretentious, overeager young writers, especially a young man named Bartow Williams-Stevens (Jackson Kelly) who accuses Hank, during class, of constantly phoning it in. Lucky Hank is about a guy who is similarly coasting through life, (barely) animated by a combination of depression, apathy, self-loathing, and general midlife crisis stuff until he eventually hits a breaking point. And then he accidentally becomes the villain of an on-campus student revolution.The un-George Saunders-ing of George Saunders is the show’s most curious development. (For the record, though, I don’t think it pulls this last thing off, especially because it would have to run a greater distance from its source material to do that. I mean, it still follows the misadventures of William Henry Devereaux Jr, or “Hank,” a one-hit-wonder novelist and the chair of the English department at a small Pennsylvania liberal arts college, during one week of his life when everything goes off the rails. If you’ve read Straight Man, it takes a second to shake into the new mode (after you’re done wondering if Occam, Hank’s large, crotch-sniffing dog, will appear).

Bob Odenkirk makes a quick return to TV in AMC's 'Lucky Hank,' as the eternally frustrated head of a college English department.

After a pilot that keeps Hank as the fulcrum, the second episode feels like a change of course with an eye toward elongation. It’s a recipe for a great literary character but not necessarily the protagonist of an ongoing series. Every time the second episode left Hank behind and followed one of the other characters, my attention waned — a bad sign in an episode in which I was already distracted by the questionable decision to have recognizable and generally terrific character actor Brian Huskey playing real-life literary titan George Saunders making a visit to Railton, rather than just casting Huskey as a character who was Saunders-esque. The show needs to find ways to give Odenkirk and DeVido more scenes together. Retaining Lily’s backbone and autonomy, a struggle in the book, is one of the most important things the show will need to do going forward, and it’s one of the things the show forgets to do in the second episode. As the character with the biggest ego and the biggest insecurity complex, Odenkirk is exceptional, balancing Hank’s combination of erudition and self-loathing and embracing the story’s occasional bouts of zaniness, which early director Peter Farrelly actually downplays from the book. Russo’s novel did a very good job of anticipating the conversations that are ongoing in English departments around the country, and series creators Paul Lieberstein and Aaron Zelman have smartly avoided turning Lucky Hank into some sort of generational lament about the eccentricities and entitlements of millennials or Gen Z; they generally duck the sort of evocations of “wokeness” or “cancel culture” that so many shows would indulge in under similar circumstances. Show-adjacent W/Bob & David for Netflix, play a key supporting role in The Post and a surely arduous lead role in [Nobody](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/nobody-film-review-4154013/), and to fit in various cameos and guest turns along the way. This puts his position and possibly the funding for his entire department in jeopardy. Hank is the head of the English department at Railton College (standing in, fictionally, for the already fictional West Central Pennsylvania University from the book). It’s a good part, tailored well to Odenkirk’s strengths without many traces of Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, with the potential to evolve into something great. He lacks the motivation to adequately teach his students, to adequately parent his 20something daughter (Olivia Scott Welch’s Julie) or to properly appreciate his endlessly tolerant gem of a wife (Mireille Enos’ Lily).

Bob Odenkirk loves Saul Goodman, but he's also ready to leave the character behind. He played the underhanded, calculating lawyer on "Breaking Bad" and then ...

"At the end I said, ‘You have a great smile. His heart stopped for 18 minutes and Odenkirk came out of it feeling a mixture of energy and exhaustion, with no real memory of what happened. It's just a different animal and you have to invent a lot more stuff.” “Lucky Hank” is based on the novel “Straight Man” by Richard Russo. Usually he was funny to you, the audience, but he wasn’t trying, but he was utterly serious about what he was doing," explained Odenkirk. “Saul Goodman was funny, but Saul wasn’t aware of how he was funny.

After playing the con-artist attorney Saul Goodman for six seasons on “Better Call Saul," Bob Odenkirk is returning to his comedic roots with the series ...

“Lucky Hank” also comes at a time where Odenkirk is still processing a 2021 massive heart attack on the set of “Better Call Saul." It's just a different animal and you have to invent a lot more stuff.” “Lucky Hank” is based on the novel “Straight Man” by Richard Russo. “Saul Goodman was funny, but Saul wasn’t aware of how he was funny. He played the underhanded, calculating lawyer on “Breaking Bad” and then for six seasons on “ Better Call Saul. He was a writer on “Saturday Night Live” and worked with some of its most notable breakouts including Adam Sandler, Chris Farley and Chris Rock.