Unlike the 2021 Netflix series “The Chair,” “Lucky Hank” does not strain to be topical about the campus culture wars. (Although the occasional use of a smartphone sets us in the present, it often feels like a Clinton-era period piece.) And unlike Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of “White Noise,” it’s not really a sendup of academic trends or pretensions.

Instead, it’s a sometimes cutting, sometimes empathetic account of the petty battles among people who have found that their career ladders are short a few rungs. Hank’s railing against Railton sets off a rebellion among the members of his department, including Gracie DuBois (Suzanne Cryer), a self-published poet; Paul Rourke (Cedric Yarbrough), her snide, possibly misogynistic antagonist; and Emma Wheemer (Shannon DeVido), a film-studies teacher whom a more traditionalist colleague dismisses as “a projectionist.”

None of these quick-drawn scholarly types are much competition for Hank when it comes to inhaling the narrative oxygen. Oddly, the best-realized side character in the opening episodes is a fictionalized version of the writer George Saunders (Brian Huskey), once a rising young star of Hank’s vintage — “I think I was better regarded for about 10 days,” Hank says — whose appearance for a campus event stirs Hank’s feelings of failure.

Fortunately, Odenkirk (who also played an academic in the undersung “Undone”) is up to the spotlight, playing up Hank’s self-sabotaging bravado but finding the melancholy underneath his sarcasm. Where Saul Goodman believed he could talk himself out of anything, Hank mainly wants to talk himself through his stasis. And notwithstanding his gift of gab, Odenkirk does some of his best character work in the moments when Hank falls silent, when you can see his resentment in the thin line of his mouth beneath his fuzzy beard.

That said, if you’ve had enough male midlife crisis in your prestige TV, “Lucky Hank” may not have a lot to offer you, for all its low-stakes charm. Penises figure in heavily here, as metaphors, as joke material and as penises. And while there’s an effort to improve on Russo’s sketching of women — I’m not sure how this could work as long-form TV otherwise — the development of characters like Gracie is still a work-in-progress.

There is a voice, a performance and a character study here. Is there a full series? Having seen only two of the season’s eight episodes, I cannot offer even a midterm grade, only some notes. “Lucky Hank” is disarmingly funny, though it feels like a draft that doesn’t yet know if it needs to be a short story or a novel. Unlike Hank with his students, however, I’m willing to hope that this show might reach its potential if it applies itself.