Preview: HBO's new Sunday drama better than its title
HBO continues on its erratic journey of trying to find winning Sunday-night dramas in the post-Sopranos era with the premiere of Hung Sunday night at 10.
The series is smarter than its title, but not nearly wise enough to be judged a keeper based on the episodes made available for preview.
Hung is the chronicle of a former high school sports star, Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane), now working as a third-rate high school basketball coach in suburban Detroit. His wife leaves him for a plastic surgeon. His kids move out after a fire that wrecks the house he inherited from his parents. Living in a tent on his front lawn and increasingly losing his grip, he takes the words of a motivational speaker to heart and decides to try and make a new life based on exploiting his "best tool." That asset is the size of a certain body part referenced in the slang title.
The title and the core conceit of the drama is a mistake by the creators and HBO in trying too hard to take advantage of the edge premium cable has over network TV in language and sex.
But this is not a silly or stupid series. From its opening images of an American flag and the wrecking ball slamming into Detroit's once hallowed Tiger Stadium, it wants to be about more than sex. It wants to be about a lost America and the downsizing of the American Dream for middle class characters like Drecker. He is supposed to stand for all the middle-aged Rust Belt men bewildered by the loss of their union jobs, pensions and futures.
That is profound stuff -- if only the series did a better job of capturing it. The idea that all he has to sell is himself is an interesting one intellectually, but it doesn't play very well onscreen.
Jane, who was born in Baltimore, does a nice job in hitting the difficult notes of this comic drama, but the scripts don't succeed in covincing us of his sexual power.
Still, Hung might work as a male fantasy for some viewers as Drecker finds himself on the road of prostitution with a failed-poet-turned-pimp played winningly by Jane Adams as his hapless guide.
It's worth a look, but it is not a series to build your viewing night around.
Comments
I caught the first of the series and found it actyally quite enjoyable. Of course, I fell for the tease in the title and wanted to see if the premise (based on the title) had the enough flesh in the script to make it past one season. The critic (if one wants to call her that) in this week's New Yorker said the series falls short of the American Drean and only teases; boy is she wrong. Janes character is the new image of the American Dream because we now longer are wishing for the new eight seater van so the soccor mom can take kitten to ballet, Bobby to soccor practice & Buddy to karate classes. The new American Dream is the hopes that one can keep their home from foreclosure, maintain health insurance and not lose their jobs. Jane's portrayal of a man in a mid-life crisis is beautifully underplayed. Its nice to see this kind of male crisis withouth the melodramatic angst usually portaried with fist going into a wall, the beating of a spouse and the drinking into oblivion.
Personally I hope the series makes it (and if there is a little more Thomas Jane in the buff all the better!)
JB
Baltimore
Hi JB, What yolu said about the new American Dream -- I think that is b rilliant. Thanks. Z
Posted by: JB hanson | July 5, 2009 8:41 PM
Thanks! Hope my letter to the editor to the New Yorker will have the same response.
JB
Posted by: J. B. Hanson | July 6, 2009 8:58 PM