Clearly the Obama administration needs to address the issue of teacher salaries and fast. On AMC's "Breaking Bad," Bryan Cranston is playing a science teacher making meth, and now we have Thomas Jane as Ray Drecker, a high school basketball coach turned male prostitute in HBO's "Hung."
Both are men of middle age who find themselves undone by fate -- Cranston's Walter White has cancer, Ray's wife has left him and he's lost his home to fire -- and a lack of ambition. Both are angry at a world that seems to have reneged on earlier promises so, with their personal landscapes scorched beyond recognition, they become, essentially, survivalists, reaching for whatever talents they have to create their own lawless, post-apocalyptic society. Recession-era Mad Maxes.
This is not to say that "Hung" is simply a sexed-up version of "Breaking Bad." Certainly there are similarities, but the same river runs through "Weeds": the belief that the old economic system is broken, that a decent living cannot be made through decency.
More important, each of the characters desire some sort of meaningful identity, which cookie-cutter, consumption-driven America seems intent on obliterating.
This is especially true of "Hung," which, despite its sophomoric title, attempts to be a surprisingly subtle study of modern adulthood in difficult economic times. (In case you don't get this, it's set in Detroit.) In this it occasionally succeeds, but at a cost to the sexual farce or frisson one might expect from such a setup. Regrettably, the word "flaccid" often comes to mind.
Ray is the quintessential former high school superstar, or at least as those who did not share in this distinction love to imagine him. Not too smart, he has never quite moved on from the arena in which he experienced his zenith -- high school. After his athletic career was cut short, Ray became a mediocre history teacher and a successful basketball coach. Which worked out OK until his high school sweetheart/wife Jessica (Anne Heche) realized this was as good as it was going to get and left him for another former school mate, the dweeb who turned into the multimillionaire dermatologist.
"You were beautiful and talented and athletic and smart and popular and hung," Jessica wails of her high school dream boy as she drives off. "Now you're just hung."
