“From playing him, I’d say he has this persona of the crabby old intellectual who doesn’t like anything and critiques everyone around him and everything that happens to him. He’s very proud of that persona and thinks it’s cool,” Odenkirk says. “There would be students who say, ‘You have to take that guy’s class, he’s funny as hell’. Now he’s reaching a point where he realises that maybe it isn’t so funny and maybe the world has changed in such a fundamental way that his persona is no longer rewarding to play.”

Loading

An adaptation of Richard Russo’s 1997 novel Straight Man, Lucky Hank was written several years ago by the team of Paul Lieberstein (The Office) and Aaron Zelman (The Killing). They imagined it as a satiric half-hour comedy, but when Odenkirk read it, he saw different possibilities, suggesting to the creators that the episodes needed to be longer to allow for a stronger sense of dramatic enquiry.

“With the kinds of emotions and backstory and subtext of the main characters, the deep resentment and pain and feelings that Hank and Lily are dealing with is worthy of a whole hour,” Odenkirk says. “If you want to explore it in any explicit way, you need space. I was one of the people, not alone, who said let’s take our time and dig into these characters.”

The fine balance between the comedic and the dramatic would be ongoing – Odenkirk puts in shorthand terms to say the show is 51 per cent comedy and 49 per cent drama. You could add, however, that finding the dividing line is different for each viewer. Odenkirk sees a kind of tragic stasis in someone like Hank having academic tenure, trapping them alongside their colleagues, but at the same time on set anyone was welcome to suggest funny lines for an extra take.

For Odenkirk, there’s also the appeal of definitively moving on from Saul Goodman. Better Call Saul concluded, after six seasons and multiple Emmy nominations for Odenkirk, last August. At the same time, Odenkirk was thinking anew about both his life and career, having suffered a serious heart attack in July 2021 on the set of Better Call Saul’s final season, where his heart stopped and had to be restarted with a defibrillator.

Loading

“That, more than anything, made me ask what can I do to play the next version of me for whatever time I have left, as a different version of myself that is more interesting or fun to be than the one I played for most of my adult life,” Odenkirk says. “You have kids, for example, and then you’re that person, and then your kids – and this is similar to Hank, my kids are 22 and 24 – are out of here. You don’t have to be that guy anymore. So who will you be?”

During his recovery from the heart attack Odenkirk was taken aback by the outpouring of public concern – “astounding and undeserved,” he stresses – that came his way. But it didn’t make him conservative about his choices. If anything, he was determined to do more, and Lucky Hank is the first step towards redefining his own expectations.

“There’s nothing like this show. It’s not about dystopias, or guns, or drugs, or cartels, or zombies, I think it’s about more shared experiences,” Odenkirk says. “There’s no genre safety valve in this show. There’s no run for your life. There’s live with your life and deal with your life. And that’s very relatable.”

Lucky Hank is on Stan.

Stan is owned by Nine Entertainment, publisher of this article.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.