Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 3 of Lucky Hank.If there was any wavering doubt that the 2023 television season has not provided audiences with one of the best series to date, that feeling should be obliterated with the addition of Lucky Hank. Following its world premiere at SXSW last month and a broadcast debut on AMC just a week later, the dark workplace comedy starring Bob Odenkirk has gone on to fervent acclaim from critics and audiences alike, praising the series for its quirky, offbeat midlife crisis tale through the lens of a perpetually pessimistic English department chairperson on the brink of a meltdown. Through first-person narration underscoring the town’s descent into mediocrity, Odenkirk’s Hank Devereaux Jr. is joined by an eclectic cast that preserves a strong captivation for every scene, including Sara Amini, who tells Collider in a one-on-one interview that the complex and layered relationship her character Meg Quigly has with the professor is about to get even more complicated.
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Following Sunday night’s third episode, “Escape,” which saw Hank spiral after trying to balance the news of a storage pod filled with his father’s belongings dropped in his front yard and orders from Dean Jacob Rose (Oscar Nuñez) to create a list of professors he needs to cut, tensions no doubt came to a boil for the Railton College professor. After a night of drinking with the college’s adjunct professor Meg, who is working hard to seek tenure in their department, he lies to her about the position in hopes he can encourage her to leave their crummy town. Depressed and upset about the stagnation of her role at Railton, Meg gets drunk and is taken home by Hank, who drops her off in her room. Upon his return from finding some painkillers to ease her hangover, Meg has undressed, leaving Hank surprised. Handing her the tablets and walking out, Amini tells Collider in an exclusive interview that it’s the start of these actions followed by his lies that will somewhat “derail” her this season.

Image via Sergei Bachlakov/AMC

COLLIDER: Congrats on Lucky Hank! This show is my new favorite; it is so well-written and the performances are just, such a stand-out. It’s so delightfully quirky and as someone who’s read the book, I’m so curious. When this came your way, how much did you know about the production and Richard Russo’s novel?

SARA AMINI: Yeah, I actually didn’t know about the book. It was exciting to kind of delve into that world and the world of academia. And then as far as the production, I mean, I auditioned just like normal. But as I was getting these scripts, I was going, “Oh my God, the writing in this show is so rich.” It’s incredible. And it’s about human stakes. And I think so much of TV right now — and listen, I watch all of the shows that I’m referencing. But so much of the TV that I’m watching right now is really stressful. It’s very anxiety-inducing. People are dying, or they’re getting attacked, or there’s a great mystery to solve, and what I love about our show is it’s just about the human condition. It’s about questioning life’s choices and feeling stuck in your career and getting promoted and getting demoted and family dynamics. And that is so wonderful to me.

I love that so much, and I will get to that whole conversation about settling versus knowing that you’re worth more than circumstances, but I wanted to talk about Meg because she’s such an interesting character. She’s a little self-destructive at times.

AMINI: That’s exactly the phrase I use for her. That’s so funny.

Yeah, she’s a little complicated, too, but I think she’s very layered, and I think that creates such a fun dynamic with Hank. How would you describe her relationship with him?

AMINI: Man, that’s a fantastic question. I agree with you, that what really drew me to Meg was how compelling I found her to be. There are a lot of dichotomies with Meg. She wants to be really taken seriously in her professional life. But then, as you said, she’s self-destructive in her personal life, and she’s lonely, and she’s very vulnerable. But then she also puts up this tough exterior and has walls up, and she can be guarded. What I really loved was that her mom’s an alcoholic, but then she works at a bar, and I thought, “Wow.” I mean, this is so fascinating that she must have felt like she had no sense of control growing up over her mom’s choices, and then she works at a bar where she gets to control how much alcohol you have. I just thought that, wow, through the writing on this show and getting to really flesh out her backstory was so fun and interesting.

And as far as the relationship with Hank goes, the boundaries are definitely blurred, and it’s complicated — and that’s what I really like about it. Russo wrote this, I think, in ’98, and so it’s told through Hank’s POV as we know, and also there’s a male gaze element to it when it comes to Meg, and I was reading it and going, “Oh, she’s kind of like a character in a war, almost like she’s a seductress.” And I was like, “Well, how do I play against that? And have their attraction to each other still be intellectual and maybe physical?” So what I kind of landed on was that Meg never quite understands who Hank is to her. Is he her mentor and that’s it, and he’s someone that she trusts and seeks advice from? Or is he the father that she never had? Or has she been in love with him since she was 17 years old? And there’s this unrequited sort of longing to connect with him on a deeper level. So I think playing with that, all of those complicated feelings you can have for one person made for, it was just interesting. It just gave layers to our dynamic that wasn’t in the book.

I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity here to flesh her out entirely for more of a personality, and I love that because she is her own person, she wants to earn tenure, and she’s Hank’s protégé in some ways too. But, what do you think it is about Hank that makes him so appealing to her? Even in all his negativity and jadedness, he’s like this strong figure. What can you tease us about that direction with those two? Is it possible there could be a romantic kind of direction?

AMINI: She trusts his opinion; she holds him in high regard, and because he respects her, also that gives her that validation to really want to pursue this. She’s got a complicated relationship with her mom, so I think Hank fills some voids for her. But as far as, yeah, going the love route, I don’t think it’s going to happen [laughs]. It’s something for me just to have and to play with as it goes on.

Image via Eric Ogden/AMC

I will say that you two have amazing chemistry on the show, and it works so well with the way the trajectory of the story’s going. But getting to the episode, “Escape.” Hank lies to Meg about the tenure track position and as he says, hopes it will help her move out of the nest. He’s taking agency from her — I didn’t like that. That was so rude [laughs].

AMINI: It’s because you’re a young woman, that’s why! [laughs] Because it’ll always resonate with a young woman differently, and we’ll go, “Why did he do that? It’s not his right, it’s not his decision to make.”

So then what’s going to happen? Can you tease us about what comes next, as Meg will no doubt find out the truth? Because that action is going to obviously have its own consequences.

AMINI: Oh, yeah, and consequences it does have! God, what I love so much about [Episode 3], I just want to say really fast, is the writing in [“Escape”] is so incredible to me because there are the parallels between Hank and Meg, in the sense that in the ways that we follow our parents’ choices and in the ways that we break those patterns. Meg goes from picking up her mom from the office, being drunk, and passing out at her place of work — at Meg’s place of work — and then she goes to work at the bar. Hank knows all this. He knows that her life is a little tough, and she’s got challenges and she wants things, and for him to lie to her so easily, I think that it kind of makes her spiral in a way.

Because look, it’s one thing to not sleep with her [in Episode 3], and I think that he, of course, did the right decision — we want his marriage to work with Lily. But it’s another thing to get in the way of someone’s career, especially when they’ve trusted you so much with their career, and I think when he lies to her, she goes, “God, it’s so easy for him to lie to my face about the job opportunities for me.” And then I’m going, “Well, does he actually believe in me? Am I a good writer? Does he think I’m a good writer? He never wrote me this recommendation letter that I’ve been asking him for. He skimmed my dissertation.” And she’s starting to really question that relationship and question herself, when she knows at the beginning when we meet her, she knows how good she is. I think she’s putting so much stock in Hank’s opinion of her that she allows this.

This lie really kind of derails her, in a way, and because she trusts him so much, and he’s someone that she doesn’t put walls up with, that she can be vulnerable with as we see in the last five minutes [of “Escape”]. But, we’re going to see her put her guard way up, and we’re going to see her make some reckless decisions that will, even more, kind of cause a rift that was already there, that Hank started. He kind of started this rift. But Meg’s going to have a string of impulsive, reckless personal decisions — and I’m not going to spoil it.

Image vai Sergei Bachlakov/AMC

I love how Bob Odenkirk is such a national treasurer. He’s so incredible, a brilliant performer. I’m wondering with how Meg and Hank share quite a lot of time together, what have you enjoyed most about developing that relationship between your characters with Bob?

AMINI: Oh my God, I adore Bob so much. Bob is actually so infuriating as a person because he’s a genius. He’s a natural genius at what he does. But then also, he works harder than all of us. It’s like the combination of it, it’s like, “All right guy, we get it. You’re incredible” [laughs]. He would show up to work and be the hardest working person in the room and really elevate all of us to kind of want to dig into the script and what else can we find, what else can we find? But he and I kicked it off really fast, and I think that you see that in the show. I’m so grateful that you said that we have great chemistry because I think that he and I have a really solid friendship at our core, and it was great to be in Vancouver. And he’s a foodie! I’m a foodie! We had a list of restaurants that somebody had given him, and we would knock off restaurants every week.

That was our weekend thing. We hang out in L.A. quite a bit, and he’s just so great. We also both got our start in comedy. So obviously, he was writing comedy at Second City, and I was, too, in Second City in Los Angeles — that’s how I got my start, was writing sketch comedy and we both have writer’s brain; we understand a story from an actor’s perspective, a writer’s perspective, so we kicked it off really easily. He’s so easy to talk to and someone I respect so much.

You talk about comedy, and I love how the showrunners are the minds behind The Office and Damages. Those two are nothing alike but also blend wonderfully for something that is both melancholic and then laugh-out-loud. Most respectively speaking, has that been challenging in any way? Because I love how this show gives us a very sad moment one second, but then there’s a sharp injection of hilarity the next.

AMINI: Yeah. Oh, for sure. It was very hard. It was a challenge. We found it, as the show, as we kept shooting, but the beginning was definitely a challenge because if it’s too silly, then do the dramatic stakes work as much? And then vice versa. If it’s too dramatic, does some of the sillier stuff work as much? So really, that marriage of comedy and drama, it was a kind of puzzle that we were all very excited to work together to figure out, and we always led with honesty. We always led with, “Okay, what’s honest about this?”

But also, what was really fun, and I think you touched on it at the beginning, was how quirky this show is. I think that’s something the writers do so well, is that they find the absurd in the mundane, and they find these characters can be very petty. But then we find the poignancy in their petty because they care about these things. They care about their parking spots, they care about tenure, and their positions. And we’re not laughing at them. We’re really immersed in this world with these very three-dimensional human beings and that’s life. Life is funny one moment and heartbreaking the next. So yeah, it was a challenge. But I watched the episodes now, and I’m going, “I think we got it. I think we nailed it.” It’s an interesting tone and there’s a fine line, and it’s a dance, but it’s rewarding to see how it paid off.

Lucky Hank airs Sundays at 9 PM EST on AMC and AMC+.