TV COLUMN: 'HUNG'
Thomas Jane's HBO Hit Goes Too Far, Hangs Too Low
(HBO) What’s the matter with you guys at HBO? You’ve got guts and courage. You’ve got clever writers -- some of the best stuff outside of the big screen. Okay, it’s not Boardwalk Empire -- first of the new season, which I’ve just watched twice, the plotting and the characterization are so good. And Hung doesn’t pretend to be great literature. It has a clever storyline. It could teeter on the edge, but only very occasionally did it fall over. Granted, I am not their demographic. It’s a young audience show, and I’m an old gal, a lover of a good story, appreciative of great plot and good characterization. I’ve been charmed season after season: Rome, Deadwood (which broke language barriers in the most clever and delightful way), Boardwalk Empire…and, for a little dessert, last season’s Hung.
It’s painful to see good shows lose confidence and shoot themselves in the foot. Take Big Love, which felt like a winner: scandalous subject, good characterization, exciting plotting. And then a new season started. I don’t know what the writers did. Got drunk? Got high? Got too big for their egos? The plotline suddenly went so ridiculous that a Screenwriting I-A student could have told you it was impossible to swallow.
And now Hung returns. Okay, yes, I come from another planet. I began with the small screen back in 1953, when my youngest son was in the crib and we got a TV and watched I Love Lucy. Comedy has come a long way since Lucy, and HBO has usually led the way. Clever plot taken to its outer limits. I get so embarrassed over Curb Your Enthusiasm -- it’s so on the nose…but it’s bloody funny! And well-written!
So Sunday night came Hung -- a lovely spoof on a high school teacher who needs cash and is pushed into doing a little prostitution on the side. Jane Adams, as his “pimp”-with- a -problem, is a hoot. He’s got a burned-down house, a couple of weird twins to raise, an ex, a beautiful body and evidently great equipment, so he uses it. It’s funny, even to an old gal whose early days of risqué movies include It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudet Colbert, where two unmarried folk share a motel room and have to string a line and put a blanket between beds, and the risqué last moment, they’re finally married, and the blanket comes down! You don’t even see it -- just the suggestion, and boy it was hot stuff.
I know…times have changed. We went further and then way far out and then farther out. Sex and the City pushed the sexual limits and finally exposed the male “thingy” with a short scene of a gorgeous Italian in an outdoor shower, but the barriers were down. It takes really sharp writing to make fun of sex in comedy. Remember that last scene in Some Like it Hot? Joe E. Brown looks at his soon-to-be bride with eyes brimming with love; Jack Lemmon reveals that he’s not a woman, he’s a man! And Joe E. Brown says, “Well, you can’t have everything.” So the last I saw of Hung, Tanya (Jane Adams), who has only one prostitute in her “stable," is taking pimp lessons from a real pimp, and it’s funny. She really shines in this series. She is so bereft of confidence that she steals pimp money to pay for her mother’s birthday party just to impress. But this first episode, which shows the now out-of -work teacher really profiting from his profession, forgets plot. They went heavy-handed, forgot satire, and went for pubic hair and bare tush and push-push. To satirize lovemaking in comedy takes a deft hand. There is so much emotionless humping in this first episode that it rates a ho-hum. Oh, there they go again. Bump bump bump.
TV can be great, and it can be tasteless. There’s slapstick and there’s violence and there’s mystery, and then there is great slapstick and great violence and wonderful mystery…you know what I’m saying: drama and comedy and excitement where you come away understanding something you didn’t understand before -- a bit of philosophy, an insight, a cognition. Take the old TV play Marty, where you came away understanding something of human nature.
Good writing is good writing, and you’re lucky when you get it today in these times when you expect faster and bloodier and edgier. When everything goes so fast that even conversation at the lunch table comes in competition with Twitter and Tweeter and texting. Drama and comedy both, if they’re well done, teach something about life. A different view. A flash of great satire. Seinfeld and his buddies are such selfish idiots, but you’re left with a great subliminal message: They are a part of you and you know it.
So, Thomas Jane, just turn your naked butt around and be done with it. Go the full monty and call it not comedy but something else. This opening episode’s sexual scenes were so explicit, why not just go porn and be done with that? If you’ve lost confidence in your writers to hold an audience...
I’ve got to tell you…I’m not saying that the old days were the good days, as us old folk are wont to say. A lot of things are better today, even the Depression. Today’s Depression is much nicer than the old one. In my day, a Depression was a Depression. You hung out in the automat with free hot water, and you put in free ketchup and you made soup and you survived! In this one, every news program laments unemployment, yet hey, a lot of people have a lot of money, and posh restaurants are still booked solid. And where did logic go? Our law enforcement tries to tell us that drugs are illegal and the whole TV industry is sponsored by pharmaceutical companies that tease us with these super commercials that promise us that every ailment and some that are not really ailments are fixable with pills. The whole TV industry pushes pills -- so transparent that, while they show us ordinary folk being cured of this and that (which they label with letter names to make them more acceptable)…what, you have an ailment which, when a cold breeze hits you, causes you to sneeze? OCS? (Outdoor Cold Sneezies?) Just take this pill. And if you have a serious depression and your one pill doesn’t cure it, take another on top of it…and meanwhile, a voice in the background explains that the pill may cause impotence and heart trouble, and you might be tempted jump off a tall building.
How did I digress? How would I live without my TV and my Roku? I’m as hooked as you. But guys, give me a break. Have a little confidence in your good writers. You have a funny premise here. You don’t have to go pubic. We all know what having sex looks like. Most of your audience do it every night. Yes, we’ve been there, done that. But we also need a good story and great humor and honest excitement.
Sorry to be so angry, but I just saw two minutes of the remake of a favorite show -- a classic British cop show -- so good, I watch episodes again and again. I saw two minutes of the remake and wanted to weep. Or throw up.
So, for my money, Hung has hung itself (hanged?), or maybe they will wake up from a drunken story conference and remember what they originally began with -- a clever premise, an edgy sexual comedy…not just a show of tush and go.
The new season of 'Hung' appears every Sunday on HBO at 10:00 p.m.
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