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Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday: Lucky Hank @ 7 episodes [1]

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Date: 2023-05-05

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

Notes on AMC’s Lucky Hank TV series so far: Will an attempt to transcend a “stodgy old English department of yore” be ghost-cancelled (for a ‘second’ time). Or has the WGA strike already cancelled it.

Unfortunately the personal projection that can be applied to Lucky Hank can be applied to all higher education, with what perhaps is a kind of de facto sequel to the cancelled Netflix series The Chair. This sub-genre is delimited by the endless stereotypes of academic life made more extreme by its setting in the humanities. Such series succeed only when they’re over the top like the aliens in Third Rock from The Sun.

The Chair probably got ghost-cancelled because the audience, not unlike those for last Century’s Thirty-something was offset by changing tastes or the historical emergence of a kayfabe reality TV audience demographic from the last WGA strike.

The writing of both Lucky Hank and The Chair could have raised more socially trenchant issues by including more science, engineering, and business faculty in ancillary roles, if only to remind us that a majority of all faculty everywhere in all American higher education is white, male, and ideologically conservative/reactionary, rather than the demonizing phantasm projected by white politicians and pundits onto the humanities and social sciences.

The exclusion of few explicitly LGBTQ characters is so far too cis-heterosexist, but perhaps that will change. If I were the showrunner, some cameos from actual diverse academics would be amusing, more so than the pathetic attempts of College Republicans to find “woke” targets for their hatred like the recent withdrawal of Dierdre McCloskey’s debate appearance at the University of Pittsburgh. I fantasize a season two “debate” at Railton College between Larry Summers and McCloskey on diversity in academe, but getting dramedy television to risk consciousness change is likely too much to ask, Hank’s one punch in the nose by a groundskeeper is the only violence beyond Hank’s memory of his suicide attempt.

The annihilation of Hank’s accumulated psychic surplus by giving his father dementia, is what drives the continuing ennui of the narrative. Otherwise the pandering to NYC as a cosmopolitan ideal for commuter marriages while typical, does not make the various relationships more interesting so far. People are cheating, others are ambivalent, and the reproduction of “relatable human behavior” continues with numerous cis-het abandonments.

If anything, giving Dean Rose a covert bisexual dalliance with faculty member Finn would have made Gracie’s narcissism and insecurity greater presence and an entry point for the LGBTQ demo aside from the pining of a gay student for the sociopathic student introduced in the first episode. Moar Brockmire!

Lucky Hank’s performances are all good however, although Bob Odenkirk’s other projects seem to be eclipsing its promotion and reception. Will this Sunday be the final episode since it’s titled “The Chopping Block”?

x 'Lucky Hank' Is a Poignant Comedy of a Fossil Trying to Change - The Atlantic https://t.co/RNQRfUsdCt — Dinosaur News (@Mydinosaurnews) May 5, 2023

Although real-life individuals did inspire Richard Russo to conceive certain characters, the author seemingly heavily fictionalized them for dramatic purposes. In addition, the author also combined his experiences from four institutions to form Hank’s experiences as a professor at the singular Railton College. Russo admitted that there weren’t drastic differences between the departments he was part of in these institutions. “Most of the stuff came from other campuses [rather than Colby College], other English departments, but they’re all the same,” Russo said in an interview given to Maine Voices Live. Co-showrunners Paul Lieberstein and Aaron Zelman set their television adaptation in the present day rather than in the 1990s, the period in which the novel is set. Lieberstein and Zelman made the characters in the novel more “diverse” and added “more women and youth” into the narrative. They were adamant about the show reflecting the present time to make their creation not a throwback to the “stodgy old English department of yore.” Russo, who wrote the source novel, approved the same as well. “The academic lunacy, it needs to be updated a little, but it’s still there. It’s still a feature of English departments,” the author added in the Maine Voices Live interview. thecinemaholic.com/… Filming of the first season of Lucky Hank took place from September 2022 to December in various locations around Greater Vancouver, Canada, including the Ladner Leisure Centre and Delta Municipal Hall.[17] The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes has reported a 93% approval rating, with an average rating of 7.5/10, based on 43 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "With the fortune of Bob Odenkirk in its favor, Lucky Hank makes ennui essential viewing with a comedy rooted in relatable human behavior".[1] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, has assigned a score of 70 out of 100 based on 24 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[22] SYNPOSIS OF EPISODE 7 Previous adaptations of Richard Russo’s novels—the film Nobody’s Fool (1994) and the HBO miniseries Empire Falls (2005)—showcased the run-down nature of the towns in which they were set, which helped viewers understand some of the forces shaping the characters’ lives and hindering their ambitions. But Lucky Hank flinches. That could be because the show is filmed in Vancouver, but even The Office managed to make Los Angeles feel Scrantonic when necessary. Perhaps there’s also a political element to this failure, as depicting the struggles of the white working class in western Pennsylvania these days could imply sympathy for the wrong party. I’m interested to see how the next two episodes of Lucky Hank resolve the tensions and plotlines it has developed so far. But I’ve given up expecting it to match the quality of its source material; that train has left the station. freebeacon.com/…

x For those saying writers (most of whom hold 2nd jobs, btw) are "rich," let me put it in a way that may make more sense to you: 1 script made into a film creates btwn 200 & 1000+ jobs. A successful film brings in 100s of millions+ in revenue, $0 of which is shared with the writer. — Ed Solomon (@ed_solomon) May 5, 2023

x Netflix Condemns WGA Strike For Putting Future Show Cancellations Behind Schedule https://t.co/gVPNuKBkb8 pic.twitter.com/dPI7FtvvIA — The Onion (@TheOnion) May 2, 2023

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/5/2166850/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-Friday-Lucky-Hank-7-episodes

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