If you missed the pilot of Hung, you may be surprised to find that the show isn't just likable, it might be lovable

You don't want to call these people "losers," exactly -- not Tanya (Jane Adams) or Ray (Thomas Jane) or the rest of this woebegone lot of life's left-behinds paying good money to be inspired in their life "dreams" by none other than Seinfeld's Kenny Bania (Steve Hytner). But then, you couldn't exactly call them "winners" either. Lyric bread?

by Ken

I really wasn't expecting much from HBO's new series Hung, which -- as I imagine you already know -- means "hung" in exactly the sense you were afraid it does. The show really is about a guy who tries to cash in on his last remaining possibly bankable asset.

The thing sounded pretty repulsive to me, and I'm hardly a prude. It just sounded, well, icky.

Of course, if you reduced Hamlet or Moby-Dick to a one-sentence plot premise, I'm not sure they'd sound like "mustn't miss" entertainments either. And I learned a lesson with HBO's Six Feet Under. If you'd asked me before the series started whether there was even the remotest possibility that I might not only watch but enjoy a show about a family that owns a mortuary, I would have sworn, "No way!" In fact, I still don't recall what exactly induced me to watch the first episode. (Maybe it was the participation of Alan Ball, off his brilliant script for American Beauty?) Nevertheless, within a few minutes, I was hooked. As with a lot of people I know, the six seasons I spent with the Fisher family remain one of my great viewing experiences.

I confess that I don't always apply this open-minded attitude. I've taken a pass on a bunch of the recent HBO and Showtime offerings -- you know, the ones in the Mormon-vampire and drug-dealing-lesbian-vampire genres. I'm prepared to believe I've missed some riveting TV drama, but I have to draw lines somewhere.

I gave the Hung pilot a shot, though. And this is in part a tribute to one of the great unheralded virtues of the DVR. A much lesser commitment is required of a person just to record a show as against actually watching it. Then, once you've got the thing on your hard drive, your options remain open, at least until you have to make the space-based decision to watch or erase.

In this regard, I sometimes think that I, with my cable-company-supplied DVR with its meager 20-some-hour capacity, have an advantage over those swells who are forced to buy the commercial rigs that are effectively bottomless veritable video vaults, where stuff can just keep accumulating, beyond human control, until presumably you're forced to do a mass purge. Those of us with the more spartan machines are forced to take stock of our storage-buildup situation on a regular basis.

Much to my surprise, I found I really liked poor downtrodden Ray, the hero of Hung. It's almost impossible not to feel for him. This is a guy whose life has followed a pretty much straight-downward trajectory since his glory years of high school athletic stardom. Along with his career, his once-promising marriage crashed and burned, and his ex-wife has traded up to financially secure suburban respectability. His two kids are nobody's prize, and even they have no use for him. His career as a high school basketball coach has tanked; it's looking very much as if his teams may never win another game.

As a running visual image of Ray's humiliation, unable to afford any better post-divorce lodging, he has been forced to move into his parents' dwelling, the hovel he grew up in. And here I detect the eye of pilot-episode director Alexander Payne, one of Hung's executive producers. In one of my all-time favorite movies, Election, he displayed a positive genius for purely visual depictions of the way a hostile universe was closing in on the doomed high school teacher played by Matthew Broderick. Remember that microscopic car he drove? Hopelessly cramped even for a person of MB's not exactly overwhelming physical stature? (He's seen below with his go-go sweeter-than-sugar student-from-hell nemesis played so frighteningly by Reese Witherspoon.)


For Hung the location scouts -- or somebody -- found a shack for poor Ray that all but screams "humiliation," especially set alongside the palatial spread of the next-door neighbor who's one of Ray's principal tormenters and humiliators. And then Ray gets burned out of even that hovel. Having naturally (Ray being Ray) failed to keep up his homeowner's insurance, he can't even begin to afford repairs, and is forced into living in a tent.

Ray's plight is so feelingly as well as hilariously drawn that I don't see how he can fail to win the heart of anyone who's ever even fleetingly taken stock of his/her life and been forced to wonder, "How the fuck did this happen to me?" He is, in other words, an even more advanced and, yes, even more pathetic case than the going-nowhere parents of Malcolm in the Middle.

As I was writing the caption for the above clip, which takes us to the Losers' Anonymous self-improvement class Ray attends in his desperate search for some way out of this dead end, it occurred to me that what Hung -- created by Dmitry Lipkin and Colette Burson -- does is to somehow make you feel the pain of these left-behinds, and I suspect to feel it more acutely than some of them are able to.

You want desperately for there to be some kind of hope for these people. And while the show could yet get icky as it gets down to, well, business, I'm fascinated to see where it's going.


THE SECOND EPISODE OF HUNG
AIRS ON HBO TONIGHT AT 10pm ET . . .

. . . right before the season premiere of Entourage. Now there's an hour of must-see TV. Of course, the episode airs again right after Entourage, and we can expect the usual zillion repeats on the various HBO channels. There are also bound to be opportunities to catch up on the pilot for those who missed it.

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