The first thing you should know about HBO's new series "Hung," which begins airing tonight, is that it's not just a show about a guy with a big penis who decides to become a gigolo. No siree.
According to its wife-husband co-creators, Colette Burson and Dmitry Lipkin, "Hung" is about the fraying of the American dream and the battered resiliency of the middle class. It's about the former golden boys and golden girls of high school being forced to navigate midlife's tricky shoals. It's about the lip-smacking ironies of extreme gender reversal, and how they can affect the dynamic between a couple.
And it's about that eternal Freudian brain-teaser, 'What do women want?' (Hint: It's not just roses and Godiva chocolates.)
Even so, Burson and Lipkin concede, for writers like themselves it's intriguing to get inside the mind and skin of Ray Drecker, the aforementioned, hugely well-endowed main character in "Hung," played by actor Thomas Jane. "It's a really weird personality type, these guys with huge penises," Burson reflected recently. "It's like they won some lottery."
Alas, in Ray's case, that's about the only thing he's won lately.
Growing up in Detroit, Ray was a popular jock and big man on campus who dated a beauty queen and once earned a pro baseball tryout. That was back during the height of the American Century.
Now Ray's a fortysomething suburban high school basketball coach and divorced dad struggling to raise two sensitive Emo teens (Sianoa Smit-McPhee and Charlie Saxton) in the semi-charred remains of his parents' old lakeside home. His ex-wife Jessica (Anne Heche), disillusioned with her former high school sweetheart and suffering from her own case of midlife blahs, has ditched Ray for a prosperous dermatologist.
But when Ray's free-spirited sometime lover Tanya (Jane Adams) proposes that he follow a self-help guru's advice and cash in on his biggest personal asset, the suggestion sticks. Ray reckons that he can earn some badly needed cash by helping women of a certain age and income fill a void in their hearts and beds.
"Ray's not in any more of a desperate situation than most men find themselves in their middle 40s," said Thomas Jane, who recently attained the big 4-0 himself. "He's looking around for a winning tool and he doesn't realize it's literally right in front of him."
