'Hung' teases, but is slow out of the gate

Which is, apparently, not enough. Although maybe it is. "Hung" is very clear on one point: No matter what you've heard, bigger is better. Meanwhile, Ray and his teenage kids, Darby (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) and Damon (Charlie Saxton), move into his parents' old and rather dilapidated lakefront home, which promptly burns down. (The sequence in which this happens will, and should, send every viewer scuttling around their homes to check for sloppy extension cord use.) And of course, Ray has let the insurance lapse.

This is where we meet him, and his voice-over (is there a way we could tax voice-overs? Use the money to perhaps pay teachers better?), sleeping in a tent outside the burned out shell of his childhood home, surrounded by the McMansions that have sprouted along the lake like so many travertine toadstools. Desperate, he attends a get-rich-quick seminar where he meets Tanya (Jane Adams), a poet with whom he has had a one-night stand. After another similar encounter, in which he uses afterglow to find his pants and the door, Tanya weepily tells him that he's such an egomaniac, he should just "market his . . ." well, I can't write it here, but you get the idea.

Empires have been built on less, and soon Ray is attempting to become a male escort with about as much success as the pre-Ratso Joe Buck in "Midnight Cowboy." (Indeed, if creators Dmitry Lipkin and Colette Burson are feeling up to it, they should invite Jon Voight or Dustin Hoffman on board for cameos.) But Tanya seems to love Ray for more than his physical endowments and soon she is helping him establish his new "happiness consultant" business.

For a half-hour HBO show about male prostitution, "Hung" tends to keep its clothes on and move v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. Lipkin and Burson appear more interested in the pitted, shrunken but still heroically vital human spirit than naked butts and intercourse. Which is admirable, but if you're looking for the male version of, say, "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" or even the raciness of "Weeds," look elsewhere. Sex in early episodes of "Hung" is surprisingly non-graphic and certainly non-erotic.

The nakedness is more of an emotional sort. Heche is, as usual, tightly wound and slightly mad, though watching her attempt to connect with her children -- Damon is a goth, Darby is dating a loser and both are maestros of not-quite-sullen silence -- is a writhe-in-your-seat pleasure.