Free Association on “Hung”

Say what you want about the quality of television these days, but there’s no denying we’re in the Golden Age of the Anti-Hero. Over the past decade we’ve seen sympathetic characters be made out of hoagie munching, skull cracking Mafia bosses (Tony Soprano), philandering plastic surgeons with a penchant for buggery (Christian Troy), a serial killer (Dexter), a self-destructive misanthrope (Hank Moody from Californication), and that misanthrope’s nebbish ancestor (Larry David). Now comes along a deadbeat Dad turned male prostitute in the form of Ray Drecker from HBO’s new series Hung. Ray is a former high school sports star who decided to take adulthood easy and now finds himself middle-aged with a dead-end job, an ex-wife (Anne Heche) who left him for her dermatologist, two kids struggling with childhood obesity and all its frills, and the burnt house of his parents which he is too poor to restore. But Ray’s one quality that has endured, his one last hope for redemption, is his extremely large penis. Faced with dire circumstances, he does the sensible thing. He becomes a man whore. Needless to say, this provocate fare has given me some food for thought. So with that being said, here’s some free association and takes from my viewing of the show.

“That night I swallowed my pride, bought a pre-paid cell phone and a box of condoms, and put an ad in the back pages of the Detroit Examiner.” If you’ve somehow incorporated this line into your pilot episode, I think you know you have a winner.

Ray makes a noble attempt to keep and restore the house his parent’s built. He ends up a prostitue. Which begs the question: why does trying to stick to one’s principles inevitably result in having to betray them ten times over?

The actress who plays Tanya (Jane Adams) was the sorry-sack loser in arguably the most depressing movie ever made: Todd Solondz’s Hapiness. In fact, she was the most depressing character in the most depressing movie ever made. This makes the fact that she dated Steve Martin all the more bothersome.

The show is pretty transparent about its assumption that Ray’s gift has led to his downfall. This kind of endowment is more of a safety net than an actual trust fund. Spend too much time being exalted for your virility and you end up soft and complacent. Figuratively.

Self-help seminars being run by guys wearing Dockers will not turn out well.

Anne Heche. Boy did she pull one over on Ellen. Gotta respect the dedication to fortune and fame to fake lesbianism. I guess at this point we can long for the days when a fake lesbian relationship was just a shameless grasp at fame by a no-name actress, as opposed to a symptom of mental illness (see Lohan, Lindsay).

“If you really wanted to get to know me, you wouldn’t have hopped in the sack so easily.” Impulse isn’t always the least legitimate motivation. In fact it’s usually the most legitimate.

The poetry in bed after sex bit is the sole and exclusive property of one Annie Savoy.

I know that making his kids pudgy, geeky, and hapless is supposed to be an expression of his poor performance as an adult, but it’s not realistic. Good looking flakes who don’t fulfill their high school promise don’t end up with schlumpy kids. Their kids inherit the characteristics of their youth, not of their adulthood, and end up cool, hip, and flakey just like their folks.

“Oh my god. You’re an egotistical asshole.” There’s something so amazingly profound about the moment a woman realizes that.