Want a clever show? Better call Bob

In a logical world, Bob Odenkirk would have taken several months – or years, or decades – off.
He had just finished 10 years playing Jimmy McGill, also known as Saul Goodman. He’d had fame, fortune, six Emmy nominations and a heart attack. As he turned 60, it was a logical time to relax.
Except then “Lucky Hank” (shown here) came along. “It happened so quickly that my head was spinning a bit,” he told the Television Critics Association.
Now the show debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday (March 19), rerunning each hour until 1 a.m. As soon as Hank (Odenkirk), a writiing professor, unleashes a rant, viewers will see why the role would be hard to reject.
“I liked this guy,”Odenkirk said. “As crabby as he is, he loves his wife.”
Well, she’s extraordinarily lovable. An enduring cliché has all high school vice-principals being cruel despots; Mireille Enos (who plays Hank’s wife) puts that in reverse.
“I’m allergic to authority figures,” Enos said. Instead, she plays someone who’s “not an administrator. She really wants to help these kids. She has these ideals about learning being beautiful.”
Hank doesn’t. Overshadowed by his famous father, he wrote one novel, which isn’t even in the campus bookstore. he teaches young writers, but has little confidence in himself and less in them.
In some ways, this could have been Odenkirk’s life, “I wanted to be a novelist,” he said. “Jack Kerouac was my guiding light.”
But at Southern Illionois University, he preferred writing comedy sketches. He did that for stage shows, for radio and then for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Ben Stiller Show.” At the latter, he met David Cross; their “Mr. Show with Bob and David” ran four seasons on HBO, delighting Monty Python fans and getting two Emmy nominations for its writing.
Odenkirk was on-camera, but didn’t consider himself an actor. “I performed, not acted, until I got ‘Breaking Bad,’” he said. “And then I had to learn how to act.”
He learned quickly, playing a shady lawyer. Then “Better Call Saul” went back to the character’s roots.
The heart attack came during the final season.. “I had to go back after five weeks, which was just enough time. They were very careful (with me), but it was hard. It was really hard.”
Afterward, Odenkirk did promotional work for the show, then had “this wonderful trip with my family.” And then he became Hank.
Paul Lieberstein had been one of the “Office” writer-producers. Then, he says, he thought “I’d like to do this with smarter people, maybe.”
The ideal seemed to be college, where tenure has someone “trapped in success …. It just allows people to kind of behave very badly, in a semi-protected way,”
Lieberstein wanted to adapt the “Straight Man” novel, but was rejected. Later, he learned that Aaron Zelman, was pushing a project based on that same book. They linked to create “Hank.”
It has “smart people doing dumb things,” Zelman said. “Which is just always funny to me.”
And sort of tragic, Enos said. “It’s funny and sad, all smashed together.”