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Hung: The Complete First Season

The timing is right for HBO's half-hour dramedy Hung. A darkly tinged recessionary comedy of (self-)destruction and erection, Hung satirizes American's slippery senses of business ethics and social morality. It's appropriate, then, that the pilot episode was directed by Alexander Payne, whose Election made a nasty joke of the American inability to tell the difference between ethics and morality, much less put the concepts into principled practice. Yes, as the title implies, there's a big dick involved, but Hung is the story of a "little guy"—jock turned sad-sack high-school basketball coach turned gigolo Ray Drecker—whose entrepreneurial spirit outstrips his inhibitions. He's an R-rated Horatio Alger hero—if he's lucky, that is.

In suburban Detroit—ground zero for our dying empire—Drecker (Thomas Jane) faces one embarrassment after another: he hasn't bounced back from his divorce, the team he coaches is a losing one, and the cabin that is his home goes up in flames, sending his kids (who are, by a hair, more materialistic than they are emotionally needy) running back to his ex-wife Jessica (Anne Heche). Like it or not, Drecker can see that he's at a crossroads. At an all-time low of confidence, Ray decides to go to a low-rent business seminar whose peppy but unconvincing instructor (Steve Hytner of Seinfeld) encourages everyone to discover his or her "winning tool" and wield it to achieve success. Ray reflects and concludes that his unique asset is his sizeable penis. A chance meeting with a former one-night-stand—failed poet Tanya Skagle (Jane Adams of Happiness)—provides Ray with some (dubious) outside perspective and, soon enough, a partner equally hungry for a taste of success. Before you can say "hustle," Tanya is a pimp and Ray is her ho.

The temptation would be to play this scenario for maximum yuks, but this isn't a FOX sitcom. Hung is determinedly low-key, to a fault. Creators Colette Burson and Dmitry Lipkin are simpatico with their hero, who is well-motivated but propelled by an energy that's somewhat logy. It's a gamble to hang a series on a guy who keeps his inner fire at a low simmer, turning with relief to a female acquaintance eager to manage his career for him. But it's also what Hung has going for it: a distinctive character dynamic between Ray and Tanya, who finds empowerment (and poetic justice) in rehabilitating the sex industry to enliven sexually deadened women or, failing that, at least line her pockets and give her a sense of accomplishment. Ray is bemused and bumbling in his initial outings, and Tanya has a reckless bravado in doing a job for which she has no demonstrable experience or skill; obviously to some degree, Burson and Lipkin are reversing gender roles here. Still, Ray is a guy's guy: athletic, handy, and drawn to beauty, which complicates matters when he's sent to service an older, heavier woman (Margo Martindale of Dexter).

Hung doesn't have the same narrative drive as its cable brethren, like the happily plot-heavy Weeds (Hung's conceptual sibling), but Hung has a more life-like rhythm than just about any show on the air, and Burson and Lipkin are in no rush inorganically to complicate Ray and Tanya's inherently complicated career move. By season's end, the meddling of client Lenore (Rebecca Creskoff) has stealthily developed into a major plot point, but that's pretty much the only definitive twist in the story. There's ongoing strain in the relationship between Ray and his teenage twin children Damon and Darby (Charlie Saxton and Sianoa Smit-McPhee) and a growing rift between Jessica and her husband Ronnie (Eddie Jemeson). School cutbacks may spell the end of the line for coach Ray and his assistant coach Mike (Gregg Henry). And Busron and Lipkin introduce an intriguing (anti-)romantic foil for Ray in Jemma (Natalie Zea), a psychologically screwed-up—or, to put it more charitably, complicated—woman who uses Ray's services to exorcise the wrongs men have done her. Hung is hanging around for a second season; it'll be interesting to see where another ten half-hours will take the characters.