A man with properties and means – Weekend
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Lucky Hank, a college drama about a midlife crisis, aired on AMC.
In a literary class, a student inadvertently challenges the teacher for frankness. The kid doesn’t know what he’s signed up for when, in a whining tone, he demands from Professor Hank Devereux (Bob Odenkirk) to evaluate his essay, a piece of queer and nonsensical prose that has just been read aloud. Hank at first refuses, but then explodes: they say, all this is monstrous nonsense, but the main thing is that it could not be otherwise. Railton College, where they are all lucky to be at the moment, is a bunch of mediocrities, including himself, Professor Devereaux Jr., who has been living here for centuries in the status of a writer, and for twenty years he himself cannot write a second novel after a little-noticed first.
This speech or, more precisely, a cry of despair causes a standard reaction for an educational institution bogged down in political correctness: the teacher insulted the student, hurt his subtle feelings, and caused injury. And I must immediately apologize – better in writing. It seems that the new series is following the path of the recent “Chairs”where dissatisfied “snowflake” students taunted an eccentric professor, or the Israeli TV series “Lesson” – where the teacher was “cancelled” for an ideological conflict with a student.
The first episodes of “Lucky Hank” in some places coincide with the “Pulpit” almost verbatim: after the first scandal, a new attack falls on Hank in the form of a public debate with an old friend who has made a successful writing career and is invited to Railton as a visiting celebrity for an insulting fee for Hank ( in the “Chair” the same “wedding general” was a certified philologist David Duchovny). “Lucky” is based on Richard Russo’s novel “The Immediate Man” (1997) in the genre of campus prose, which is built on quite standard tropes – hence the similarity. Here it is tempting to imagine how the mediocre student Lifanov would call the poor fellow Buzykin to the trade union committee for the phrase “And you will only divide with your babble”, and grin: our “Autumn Marathon” is also, whatever one may say, campus prose, only the golden politically incorrect age.
But then the series turns to its own problems and demonstrates its streams and hillocks from the neighboring area: here is the autumn marathon of a disappointed middle-aged man whose daughter is married to an idiot, his wife wants more than living in the provinces, infantile colleagues whine and gossip, and he still can’t figure out the relationship with his father. Hank – already gray in his beard – is still obsessed with serious childhood trauma: his father, William Henry Devereux Sr., a venerable literary critic and former dean of Railton, abandoned his family and him, little Hank, under rather dramatic circumstances. And now Hank, like poor fellow Buzykin, drags out a semi-ghostly existence, seemingly warm and in the hall, but with a terrible emptiness somewhere in the chest area.
“Adult life is 80% suffering,” says Hank. “Mine is thirty,” retorts his wife Lily (Mireille Enos). The challenge Hank needs to solve is to be honest with himself: To what point, to what tiny percentage, does his level of happiness and self-satisfaction need to drop in order for him to dare to change? For this, Buzykin had to be expelled by his wife and mistress at the same time, and Varvara’s girlfriend had to take away the translation of her beloved Scofield from under her nose. Something comparable happens to Hank: his wife gets a job in New York, and the college president (Kyle MacLachlan in this role allows a bit of the demonic “Twin Peaks” in this role) forces him to create a “hit list” of colleagues who will be laid off due to cuts in funding . It is here that he becomes strong-willed and whole enough to finally … talk with his father and find out why he left his son 40 years ago.
“The misery industry is a multi-billion dollar business, but the happiness industry consists of just one person who lives in Canada and breeds unicorns,” says Hank. Richard Russo’s novel, by the way, is also part of this industry of misfortune, as is his Pulitzer-winning book Empire Falls (which also has a TV series), as well as his brilliant screenplay of the underrated absurdist noir Ice Harvest (2005) – all these are stories of grown men with a draft inside. But now the position of such stories has shifted a bit. A series dedicated to “first world issues” where no one is fighting for survival and gasping for breath, bruised by social upheaval, but just middle-aged privileged men living through a midlife crisis, still feels partly a message from the golden age: as if someone breeds unicorns in Canada.
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