Hung (HBO, 2009)IMDB LinkA new trend in TV shows seems to be about average people being forced to get involved in unethical professions due to their circumstances. We had “Weeds” and the really, fucking brilliant, “Breaking Bad”. This time, HBO wants to try their hand at it.
The average person is high school coach and history teacher. His wife has left him for a doctor and lost his teenage kids to the wife because his house burnt down, and he did not insure it. Ray (Thomas Jane) used to be a handsome, popular, athletic young man, the kind of person who assumes life will always turn out well for them. But now he is older and is a failure, and needs money to rebuild his house and get his kids back, but what asset does he have?
His huge dick, it seems. And he tries to market that by being a gigolo. But like “Weeds” and “Breaking Bad”, crossing the mental line into doing a job one did not expect doing before is the easy part. The difficult part is actually getting to know the ropes. Even whoring oneself out is not as easy as it seems.
He soon pairs up with another unsuccessful person. Tanya (Jane Adams) is a “poet”, the sort of person who calls themselves that but have never actually published anything. Tanya convinces Ray that she will be his pimp.
So far, all of this sound like it would make for a brilliant show, but it does not know where to go with it. The show has so little idea about how it wants to explore the business side of the profession, that it keeps sidetracking into uninteresting plotlines, like the ex-wife’s relationship with the kids and Tanya’s relationship with her new boyfriend, neither of which are why we are watching this show. The ten-episode first season seems like a pilot, given how little it actually progressed. A failure. No wonder I never heard anything about the show aside from the initial news of its premise before the show debuted.
2/5
