Thinly premised show goes surprisingly deep

Ray Drecker finds himself backed into a corner financially and forced to ponder the worth of his greatest asset in Hung. Photo / Supplied

Ray Drecker (Hung, last night, TV One) is a big loser who lives in a Detroit familiar to anyone who has seen Mike Moore's Roger and Me: a cityscape of derelict buildings and wrecking balls.

This is the metaphor for Ray's life. He's a former star athlete now high school coach who was married to the homecoming queen (played with such shrieking brittleness by Anne Heche that her performance puts you in mind of fingernails on blackboards) until she divorced him and married a rich dermatologist.

Ray moved back to his parents' house, a crumbling shack surrounded by McMansions. His kids are chubby and unattractive and his son wears black nail polish and, on occasions, lip gloss. He's into a style and music Ray thinks is called gothic. That's how much of a loser he is.

Last night was the pilot so we get the set-up: yet another dysfunctional American family losing its grip on the American dream. Ray's house burns, his kids move in with banshee mom and the mole doctor, he wasn't insured, he can't pay his taxes, and so his house and life crumble around him.

He goes to a wealth-generating seminar where he encounters a dippy poet lady he once spent a night with. This is the set-up to an oddball relationship. They have sex again. He's dismissive. She says, "it's not like you're some genius in bed. So okay, you have a big dick. I mean, whoopee. What do you want? A parade?"

So we've got to the premise of the thing which, you might have guessed from the subtle title, is that Ray has a large appendage. Are there appendage jokes? They prove irresistible. At the seminar, the money-making guru asks his students to come up with an idea: their "one winning tool". This was such a good gag it was used again and again.

We know what Ray's winning tool is, but can he market it? That's where poet lady comes in - her winning tool is "lyric bread", handmade gluten-free cranberry walnut sonnet loaf, anyone? She offers to be Ray's marketing manager, for a fee. In other words, the poet lady wants to be his pimp.

Pimp/poet lady Tanya is played by Jane Adams with considerable greasy-haired, depressive charm. She's a loser too, but you know she was always one. She was the geek girl at high school who ate her lunch in the library while Ray and his homecoming queen swanked and strutted their already diminishing status around the court that is school. Tanya is, in other words, the quiet star of the show, and, in her defiantly unsexy knickers, the only character with any sex appeal.

Ray is not sexy; he was probably never sexy, he just thought he was. We've seen him at the act, with Tanya. His through-gritted-teeth bouncing wasn't sexy; she managed to be, even while having to utter some of the sillier in-the-heat-of-the-screen-moment endearments regarding that appendage.

Hung has a daft, desperate premise. But it might just turn out to be a rather gentle little show about friendship.

Television

What: Hung
When: Last night, TV1