Show notes
“I was particularly interested in writing comedy,” says Paul Lieberstein, who is best known for playing Toby on The Office, but has writing credits for King of the Hill, The Drew Carey Show, Ghosted, Space Force, and now, Lucky Hank. “Some Woody Allen short stories and Steve Martin albums. In my twenties, I learned there was a whole industry there, and you can do that, because I had never met anyone who had done that.”
Aaron Zelman, the co-creator of Lucky Hank, also realized he enjoyed writing at an early age, even though he didn’t feel he was particularly good at it back then. “It dovetailed with my interest in theater, acting, and improv. The more I did it, the more I wanted to be the one creating what I was doing.” Zelman’s additional writing credits include Law & Order, Criminal Minds, Damages, and The Killing.
Together, they have adapted Richard Russo’s 1997 novel, Straight Man. The novel can be described as follows: “William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character—he is a born anarchist—and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.”
The writers say the book is hilarious, but also very serious. “There are some darker, underlying currents of what defines the character of Hank and we didn’t want to shy away from that.” Lieberstein says, “Something we had to talk about a lot was the storytelling demands of the hour, like how little could we do. We just wanted to do people that are living, without soap stuff, or overarching concepts. We were stretching the boundaries of how little we could do, knowing we had an obligation to keep people interested.”
To find this balance, the writers say they rewrote every single episode about four times. “The thing that we kept coming back to, doing as little as possible, we didn’t want to implode bigger concepts. We didn’t want to throw in a murder. It was a challenge to keep the audience entertained without doing that stuff, but in my life, things feel pretty damn dramatic without a murder to solve. We wanted to have an audience go on that ride too.”
To encompass all of this in one idea, the writers came up with the story driver: “The high drama of everyday life.”
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