“Part of it came from this idea after The Office,” revealed Lucky Hank co-showrunner and executive producer Paul Lieberstein, who portrayed Toby on the NBC sitcom. During a TCA panel for the new series, an adaptation of the novel Straight Man by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo that premieres tonight on AMC and AMC+, Paul shared that he was looking for a similar workplace comedy that involved smarter people than the crew at Dunder Mifflin in Scranton. “I loved the university. And I love this idea about tenure where you are trapped in success. You can't leave that job. So, it just allows people to kind of behave very badly in a semi-protected way. It really felt like this was a great opportunity. And for some reason, television kind of stayed away from the university. And I think, really, not understanding just how relatable it is and just how much of a workplace it is. And then there was the novel, which I loved.”
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Paul Lieberstein and co-showrunner Aaron Zelman eventually too their idea to executive producer Mark Johnson. “What I love about this world is it has a parallel with those of us in show business,” Mark explained. “We have to constantly fight the fact that we start to feel self-important, and which of course we're not, and we have to put everything in perspective. In the academic world, everything is life and death, everything is operatic. Are you going to get tenure? Who's doing what? How come his classes have more people than her class? Whatever it is. And so they're constantly infighting over seemingly the most important things in the world, and everybody outside the academic world, which is 99.7%, we don't care. It doesn't matter. And it's wonderful to realize, as I said, once again, all of us have to be really careful and check ourselves. And there's something about both the comedy and sort of the heartbreak of the academic world.”
For Bob Odenkirk, who stars as the titular Hank, the project was pitched to him while he was still shooting the final season of Better Call Saul. “I liked it a lot,” he said of the script. “And then I read the novel, Richard Russo's novel, Straight Man, and then I read it again because translating something from a novel to television or a movie is always a trick. It's always going to evolve or change. So I wanted to see what it shared in common with the novel and where it went. And I liked it very much, especially in connection with the work I'd been doing on Saul. I liked this guy. As crabby as he is, he loves his wife. Saul was really alone. I mean, he wanted Kim to love him, but she wasn't somehow going to. They were never going to really be fully embracing each other. It was a tough guy to play. He was so alone. And so I like that this guy loved his wife and she loved him. I liked that he loved his daughter and even though they fight, she loves him. I like the humor of him. He's funny, and he knows he's being funny. He's making jokes all the time, which is where the original title came from, Straight Man. Richard Russo's reference was to a comedy duo. We changed it, or they changed it because obviously, ‘straight man’ doesn’t mean quite the same thing. It has other dimensions to it now than when the novel was written, and we didn’t want to get that confusing. And I think there's something beautiful about Lucky Hank in that it is in the novel, that term, that name, and also he is a lucky guy as it turns out. He may think he's unlucky but the more you watch it, the more you think, wow, you got lucky, man. I just like the positive sides to it in relation to Saul.”
With so much of the series hinging on Hank’s relationship with his wife, who also happens to be in academia, selecting the right actress for the part was important. For Mireille Enos, who has spent much of her career in action, landing the role of Lily Devereaux was a welcome change. “I fell in love with it from the very first page,” Mireille revealed. “It was so articulate, and weird, and wonderful, and human, and all the things. And I kept trying to figure out, as I read and reread, what Lily’s voice was, what her piece of it was, because you’ve got a lot of cynics in this… What’s her piece? And what kept coming back is that she’s, for better or worse, this bright spot. And I think she’s been using that, like I think it’s true about her, but I think also we fall into patterns in our life where we use these things as our crutches, and so she’s going to make sure her husband’s okay and make sure her daughter’s okay, and the kids are okay, and then at some point she’s like, ‘Am I okay?’ You forget to ask yourself. And so that’s been really fun to explore. Like, what part of that is genuine and serves her, and when does it tip into this version of her that doesn’t serve her, and what’s the underside of that?’”
“I wanted to be a novelist,” Bob Odenkirk reflected on his own college goals as he finds himself in the on-screen role of an English professor in a series based on a novel. He studied the work of John Gardner and, coincidentally, Straight Man scribe Richard Russo has been dubbed Gardner’s heir apparent. “It would be very interesting to talk to Richard Russo about this. I talked to him briefly. I didn’t ask him this question, I wish I had, if John Gardner is actually an archetype for Hank’s father because John Gardner wrote a lot of literary criticism, a lot, and he was great at it and very famous for it, which is a strange thing to be popular about.” As for Odenkirk’s personal novelist hero, he was obsessed with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and pitched an idea to the writer’s room that found its way into the second episode. So be on the lookout for that personal Easter Egg from Bob Odenkirk’s life.
Lucky Hank premieres at 9/8c tonight on AMC and will also be available to stream on AMC+. New episodes release on Sundays.