Even in the now-busy TV summer, the season premieres of "Entourage" and "Hung" are a big deal

This is HBO's official preview for season seven of Entourage, which launches tonight.

by Ken

Short version: Tonight marks the season premieres of HBO's current comedy gems, Hung and Entourage.

Here's the last thing I wrote about HBO's improbably endearing Hung:

There's clearly something going on between Ray (Thomas Jane) and Tanya (Jane Adams) -- whom I've described as two of "life's left-behinds." But so far it hasn't produced happy results either in bed or in their, er, joint business venture.

"Why can't I ever see people for who they really are? . . .
"My mother was right, I'm too desperate to be liked."

-- Tanya, "the world's worst pimp," in Sunday's Hung

What continues to delight me about Hung is its refusal to be plot-predicatable while remaining both charming and stubbornly believable. It even turns out that we haven't heard the end of Tanya's "lyric bread." She's even adopted Ray's suggestion that the poems (or other inspirational texts) stuffed into her baked goods would need to be laminated, and from Sunday's episode it's looking like the lyric bread is even throwing off plot lines of its own.

The rise of original cable programming has changed the TV landscape in a lot of ways, but perhaps none starker than the new life it's pumped into summer viewing, which for so many years was a wasteland as far as the broadcast networks were concerned.

Just off the top of my head, AMC has gotten in a full season of Breaking Bad, with season four of Mad Men's on the horizon. Lifetime is rounding out the new season of Army Wives. TNT has given us the final season of Saving Grace, and now new seasons of Leverage and HawthoRNe, with the return of The Closer upcoming. USA has given us new seasons of In Plain Sight and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and now Burn Notice and Royal Pains, with the return of White Collar and Psych in the offing. Meanwhile, NBC seems to be treating Friday Night Lights like a cable show -- perhaps to its benefit creatively, if not ratings-wise.

I'm sure I've forgotten a number of others. And most of these networks are also unveiling new shows. Of course the cable networks start with the enormous advantage of significantly lower viewer expectations. Numbers that make for a cable megahit would bury a network offering. And it's certainly not true that those networks do nothing of interest.

Still, the cable networks have the freedom to respond to genuinely interesting ideas featuring creative writers and talented actors, while the broadcast networks continue to depend on officially recognized "draws," which more often than not leads them into fatiguingly imitative rot. And while most of broadcast TV's hit series are oversize versions of these hybrid retreads, every now and then they discover that creative writers and talented actors can also produce network hits.

I thought it was significant that Sopranos creator David Chase insisted, while the show was still up and running, that contrary to everyone's assumption he could have imagined it on broadcast TV. Sure, it would have required some toning down (as has indeed been done for the A&E reruns), and I'm sure it would have been a much more enervating experience for Chase and team, who would have faced episode-by-episode battles royal with network suits, but it says something to me that in his mind he could have imagined it.

I think it's easy enough to imagine a broadcast version of Entourage, though again there would be a weekly siege by network suits insisting that it be made more "accessible" for dumbed-down audiences. I don't suppose there's any way that Hung could have passed muster on a broadcast network, even though the show itself has been strikingly chaste. Still, the premise of a guy trying to capitalize on his one remaining asset by going into the escort business would surely be unsanitizable. Never mind that the life dilemmas of all the characters are more recognizably human than most anything we see on broadcast, which packs as much tawdry salaciousness into its programming as it thinks it can get away with.

I know where I'll be tonight.

#

Comedy Tonight: You can't keep a bad idea down -- on Hung, Tanya's "lyric bread" is back!

There's clearly something going on between Ray (Thomas Jane) and Tanya (Jane Adams) -- whom I've described as two of "life's left-behinds." But so far it hasn't produced happy results either in bed or in their, er, joint business venture.

"Why can't I ever see people for who they really are? . . .
"My mother was right, I'm too desperate to be liked."

-- Tanya, "the world's worst pimp," in Sunday's Hung

What continues to delight me about Hung is its refusal to be plot-predicatable while remaining both charming and stubbornly believable. It even turns out that we haven't heard the end of Tanya's "lyric bread." She's even adopted Ray's suggestion that the poems (or other inspirational texts) stuffed into her baked goods would need to be laminated, and from Sunday's episode it's looking like the lyric bread is even throwing off plot lines of its own.

Good news for those who've missed the early episodes: HBO is repeating the first three episodes this Thursday evening at 8:30 ET; check your local listings for exact times. -- Ken

#

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.

#