This is an element that the showrunners of Lucky Hank have amplified from the book, which was set in a period when state legislatures were in the middle of their project of defunding the humanities at state schools but when things were not yet so dire as they are today. Like The Chair, the 2021 Sandra Oh–starring Netflix series about another troubled English department at another small fictional school, Lucky Hank is about conflict among people fighting over a shrinking pie, a rapidly dwindling resource not just of money but of the ability to do what you love. You can have a good life teaching and writing, even in this economy, the existence of this character tells us. In Saunders, the show’s writers picked the perfect character for this episode: a boomer writer who has won every prize you can win, and who (by the way) has tenure (at Syracuse) but who is also prolific and undeniably profound. Are these issues still interesting, at this time of extreme precarity? It turns out they are. It’s the episode that does the best so far at returning to the novel’s rapidly-becoming-outdated set of questions about hierarchy and ambition among people who work in the humanities. It features the comic actor Brian Huskey playing the fiction writer George Saunders, a real-life person whose real-life success serves as a foil to what Hank would see as his own wasted promise. The pilot of Lucky Hank lacks this kind of depth.

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Odenkirk comedy