'Hung' speaks to people disillusioned with the American dream

As an actor, Jane said, he can identify with Ray's history of career ups and downs, exhilarating highs followed by steep reversals, or vice versa. A high school dropout who once earned a living busking on Santa Monica Boulevard, Jane was redeemed through acting. After scoring some early successes in such films as "Boogie Nights," he said, "I went on to do crappy movies after that, kind of disappeared for a while."

But he bounced back in 2004 starring in Jonathan Hensleigh's "The Punisher" as an avenging father opposite John Travolta. "As an actor, me and Ray are similar in that regardless of how I feel on any particular day, I've still gotta go in there and fake it," he joked.

Ray's odyssey, Jane said, is "a man's journey into the heart of female darkness. It's a real journey into the female form. That for me is beautiful. I'm a lover of women, they fascinate and terrify me."

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In this economy

Setting the series in Detroit turned out to be propitious, although mainly for unfortunate reasons. Ray's hard-luck hometown has become ground zero of declining Rust Belt America, the symbol of a nation in economic mid-life crisis. "Everything's falling apart. And it all starts right here in Detroit. The headwaters of a river of failure," Ray's voice intones over shots of abandoned auto plants and the old Tiger Stadium being ripped down, in the pilot episode directed by Alexander Payne ("Sideways").

Today those images speak even more to the plight of southeastern Michigan, which has one of the nation's highest unemployment rates, and the country at large than they did when Burson and Lipkin first scoped out the series.

"As writers we are interested in class, we are interested in the economic factors influencing people," said Lipkin, who as a pre-adolescent immigrated with his family from Russia to Baton Rouge, La.

"Once we started shooting in Detroit, the economics just started infusing everything," Burson said. "Ray is like the middle class who's being squeezed."

As for the show's titillating set-up, viewers may find their attention pulled well beyond Ray's anatomical giftedness as they get drawn into the 10-episode series. Michael Lombardo, president of HBO programming, said he was "a little disconcerted" when he first heard about the show.

"And then I read the script," he said. "I think what they [Burson and Lipkin] tapped into is what I'll call a certain male middle-age malaise, particularly for men who feel they may have peaked in the first half of their life."