‘Lucky Hank’: faculty lounge intrigue
Bob Odenkirk returns in “Lucky Hank” (9 p.m. Sunday AMC, TV-14). Few actors are as well-suited to appear in a tale of male menopause, writer’s block and professional stagnation as the title character from “Better Call Saul.”
Adapted from Richard Russo’s novel “Straight Man,” this eight-episode limited series takes place in the English department of Railton College, an accredited but undistinguished institution in a Pennsylvania Rust Belt town.
Hank — full name William Henry Devereaux Jr. — is barely known for one promising book that he never quite followed up. And he frets that even that slender brush with fame was due to his much more famous father, a man he’s avoided for decades.
Mireille Enos (“The Killing”) plays Lily, his improbably cheerful wife, prone to late-night jogs and lost causes.
Hank is first seen digging his own professional grave in his creative writing class. When Barto (Jackson Kelley), a precocious and flagrantly unqualified would-be novelist, challenges Hank’s opinion, the frustrated professor lashes back and, along the way, condemns all Railton students as far too mediocre to get in to better colleges. Can tenure protect him from his gruesome honesty?
“Hank” borrows a lot of impressive talent from familiar comedies, including producer Paul Lieberstein from “The Office.” Oscar Nunez from that series plays a harried dean. Gracie Dubois (Suzanne Cryer, “Silicon Valley”) is Hank’s department nemesis, a self-published feminist poet and professional victim. Diedrich Bader (“The Drew Carey Show”) plays Hank’s confidant and squash partner, a man embarking on a midlife quest to make up for the meaningless sex he did not enjoy in his youth.
These composite parts make for a strong ensemble of faculty misfits, but they also might suggest a jokey half-hour sitcom. For all of Hank’s worldweariness, the show lacks the depth and gravitas to justify hour-long visits to a miserable man employed by middling institution where the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low.
› Pretty to look at but low on characters you can root for, the eight-part series “Marie Antoinette” (10 p.m., Sunday, PBS, check local listings) returns viewers to Versailles and its “Mean Girls” atmosphere.
Emilia Schule stars in the title role. We first meet her as an Austrian princess, married off in a purely political arrangement. At the time, her closest confidant is her little pug dog who follows her everywhere. But she’s forced to give even it up as she reaches the border. Pugs (or “mops” in German) are apparently too Austrian for French tastes. That little dog may be the last likable character to be seen.
Marie soon discovers that the entire French court has it out for her and feasts on her every mistake and stumble. Worse, the Dauphin, or future Louis XVI (Louis Cunningham, “Bridgerton”) is a serious weirdo, given to hunting small game, sleeping outside and engaging in other feral behavior that leaves him with appalling body odor. And, as we have learned from history and historical gossip, he was endowed with a genital malformation that made consummation difficult and long delayed the birth of any heirs, a delay blamed publicly on the Austrian upstart.
Look for James Purefoy as the Dauphin’s randy father, Louis XV, and Gaia Weiss as his infamous mistress Madame du Barry, a schemer whose status wanes as Marie becomes more confident in her role.
Not to give too much away, but “Marie Antoinette” concludes its eight parts with the ascension of the awkward young couple to the throne and ends before the Bastille, the Revolution and the guillotine.