Hung is HBO's latest offering, a half-hour dark comedy starring Thomas Jane as Ray Drecker, a desperate has-been who ends up as a gigolo. The show goes to great lengths to emphasize Ray's desperation: he's the coach of a losing high-school basketball team and his ex-wife (ably played by Anne Heche) left him for another man. Worse, the parents his house left him has burned down, saddling him with a massive home repair bill that he can't afford (due to a lack of insurance) and forcing his kids to move in with his ex-wife and her new husband.
Long story short, he realizes that his only real talent is his, erm... endowment. And through a variety of strange circumstances he ends up as a gigolo, being pimped out by Tanya Skagle, an Earth Mother-y one-night stand of his. Hijinx ensue.
The funny thing is that, with one exception, the cast is actually pretty good. It's nice to see Jane Adams get a solid leading role, and she's more than passable as Tanya. Her character is melodramatic and feels like a hopeless failure, and Adams conveys that sensibility quite well. Anne Heche (whom I was surprised to learn was still working) is more than serviceable as a parent desperate to get her adolescent kids to like her, even though it's very clear they prefer being with their father. The kids are well cast, as well: though they're the product of a former Prom King and Queen, they're most certainly neither. But Charlie Saxton and Sianoa Smit-McPhee do quite well as the kids: like all adolescent siblings, they aren't supposed to get along, but they're also supposed to love each other despite their differences. And it all comes across quite well.
But then you get to Thomas Jane, and he's rubbish. Oh sure, he looks the part of Ray Drecker perfectly, but the man's abilities are subpar. (Let's put it this way: he was Frank Castle in the first Punisher film, which is almost certainly the worst movie I've ever seen.) He has roughly the same acting abilities as a piece of cheese, and the character he plays is whiny, boring and uninteresting.
As this suggests, the quality of the writing has a noticeable effect on the show as a whole. The dialogue and character interaction are executed well, though the overall story is predictable and not sufficiently engaging. Ray Drecker's voice-overs are whiny, boring, and predictable as well, which further complicates the viewer's ability to engage with the protagonist. And if you can't engage with the main character in a story, you probably aren't going to like the story as a whole.
The brightest part, oddly enough, is the setting. Picking Detroit for a show about a man's desperation to get by as everything falls apart around him is fitting; indeed, Drecker's attitude often seems to take on qualities not unlike the refrains we hear coming from Detroit itself. Sadly, however, the writers are a bit too proud of this link -- Drecker's opening voice-over takes this bit and beats you over the head with it. With a baseball bat. On the Death Star.
I want to like Hung, because it's not a bad concept and it definitely shows signs of promise. But based on the first six episodes I have to say that there's really not enough to like to justify watching it. Unless you like Thomas Jane's somewhat-vacant, somewhat-whiny gaze combined with self-pitying voice-overs. Perhaps it will pull a Dollhouse and improve dramatically in the later episodes of the first season, or perhaps even in the second since it's just been renewed. However, I get the sense that there really isn't as much raw material to work with as there is with Dollhouse. What a shame.
