Jane Adams
Why I love Hung
“I used to have a family. I used to have a wife, kids, a house, a job. Now I have my dick. A dick and a dream. If that’s not the American way, I don’t know what is”. — Ray Drecker
Ray Drecker is 40-ish and devilishly handsome. He’s smart, patient, loyal, and a talented athlete. A former minor league baseball player turned high school basketball coach and history teacher, he leads a modest life with his twin high school age children in the nice lakeside home bequeathed him by his parents. And oh yeah, as the series title suggests, he has a large penis. And his world is coming apart at the seams.
Like Nurse Jackie, the series takes a look at what good people turn to in untenable situations. In Ray’s case, he’s just hit bottom not only by his divorce, but also the near loss of his home to fire (after his insurance lapsed). As a teacher and coach, he simply does not earn enough money to be able to repair his home, and is forced to live in a tent in his backyard, while he works on fixing his badly fire damaged roof in his spare time. Because of these living conditions, he is unable to provide for his kids, and they must live with his ex-wife, who has gone on to marry a wealthy dermatologist. Emasculated and desperate to earn more money, he ends up at a hokey get-rich-quick seminar. Encouraged to find his “own tool” to market for success, he beds a self-described “poetess”; a former acquaintance and fellow seminar attendee, who, in a fit of rage after he leaves too promptly after sex, shouts “go and market your big dick“! And so a series is born. Ray actually is inspired to market himself to women.
I wasn’t sold on the premise. I realize that any reasonably stable person (and Ray does seem to be such a fellow) has to be desperate and bottoming out in order to go from that particular point A to that particular point B, and he just wasn’t coming across that way. And after all, isn’t the target audience for male prostitution primarily, well, other males?? But I took the leap of faith and stayed with it. I’m glad that I did, because what unfolded this season ended up being a fine Shakespearean tragicomedy. The “poetess”, Tanya, becomes Ray’s pimp, launching an enterprise entitled “Happiness Consultants”. Tanya represents the particularly feminine — the creative, the insecure, the caring and wily and intuitive, which, she insists, is her ace in the hole: she understands women and their needs. Ray, being particularly masculine, doesn’t. And so a partnership is formed, albeit a tenuous one from the start, as neither one knows particularly what they’re doing or getting each other into.
Thus begins a fascinating series of rendez-vous that, each in their own way, provide part of an answer to the question: “what do women want”? And the answer, it turns out, is really quite surprising and complicated. Enough, in fact, to base a TV series on. I got over my initial misgivings of the premise. We do, after all, now live in a Craigslist culture in which one can, in a straightforward line, decide what they want to do for a living and market themselves. And left and right, people being pushed off the edge – out of jobs, out of benefits, out of their homes, have used this Craigslist economy as a life jacket: doing what they have to do to stay afloat. And Hung provides a farcical celebration of this bottom-up culture, set in the symbolic heart of the American 21st century wasteland: Detroit, Michigan.
The cast is populated with deeply rich characters: The beautiful and Machiavellian Lenore, who began as Ray’s first client and wrapped the season as Tanya’s main rival for the helm of Happiness Consultants; Darby and Damon, Ray’s high school age twin children, who have almost shockingly (in a very refreshing way) not-ready-for-primetime looks, and even Tanya’s mother, who only appears briefly during one episode, but the exchange is so very real and palpable that you feel instantly that you really get Tanya’s character.
And despite the farcical underpinnings of the series, it is indeed chock full of these very real and palpable moments; as if the evocation of the penis in the title and in the storyline is a vehicle in which to instantly cut through to the very intimate – to get to what the characters are really like, and what they really want. With an episode, it can provide the depth that would take a regular series weeks of character development to access, and in the very capable writer’s hands, it deftly delivers. This metaphor is reinforced by the opening sequence, in which Ray is walking down the streets of Detroit, beginning in a full suit of clothes. Piece by piece, he disrobes as he walks until he arrives at his house and jumps, nude, into the lake. And the characters in the series tend to follow the same pattern, albeit on their own schedules, of disrobing, at least in the metaphorical sense. And people never seem to be what you’d expect.
Stay tuned to HBO for season two!
