Ray Drecker is pretty much the perfect emblem of post-crash America. He was once a great man—popular, handsome and successful—but now he’s alone with a burned-down house and no insurance to pay for it. His only solution lies in his one innate gift.
A big penis must be good for something, right?
Maybe and maybe not. Though it’s telling that his first conundrum is so quintessentially American: “How do I market this thing?”
HBO’s newest series, the irresistibly titled Hung, doesn’t come close to filling its girth-y premise. Once exposed, I was, to put it mildly, underwhelmed. The problem being that an interesting premise can’t support wooden acting and tedious writing.
See, Ray is a failing high school basketball coach in Detroit, a failing city. He’s divorced from his wife, who remarried to an evil banker or doctor or something. All he really wants is to live with his kids, a set of duck-looking twins who bear exactly no resemblance to their TV-land mother or father, and live a quiet, unassuming life. Too bad his house burned down due to negligent electrical habits. Too bad he forgot to pay his insurance. Too bad he’s just one more over-leveraged, middle-class bozo, so tricked by the good times he forgot the bad.
Too bad, basically, that his life is fucked.
The kids move out, he pitches a tent in the yard and considers his options. With the help of a get-rich-quick conference and an annoying woman who won’t go away, Ray decides to put his tool to work. He’s gonna become a middle-age man whore.
While this tale of suburbia gone dark is hardly new, the wind-up seemed to have some pitch—like Boogie Nights meets Weeds. Unfortunately, everything is washed beige. Ray’s moral dilemma—the central subtext of the show—doesn’t seem to exist. He just sort of dutifully marches through life big, dumb and dick in hand.
Maybe that’s the problem. As played by Thomas Jane (you might know him from Punisher), Ray is an uninteresting simpleton. Yes, there are many boring people out there, but why would you make one of them the main character in a HBO drama? The characterization of Ray is so off, right down to the fact that his persona is in dissonance with the world Hung creates.
From top to bottom, Hung feels like a mismanaged property. The tone isn’t right. The casting isn’t right. It lacks energy or style. In a world where edgy cable dramas are a dime a dozen, this show blows its only asset.
I’m confident that the writers can pull Hung out of its early season expositional blues. As soon as Ray starts dealing with the realities of being a prostitute, rather than the awkward failures of the first two episodes, the plot lines should become more engrossing. (The big deal in the second episode? Ray gets his wallet stolen, maybe.)
The bigger dilemma lies with the show’s wrong-headed insistence that its story is about more than the obvious. While Ray is an emblem of America in collapse, the metaphor should work itself out over the course of a season. But the show’s creators seem intent on making clear from the beginning that this is not just a show about a man with a big dick.
The result is a funny premise sucked of all its life, a too-serious drama about a none-too-serious topic.