HBO's "Hung": The Show About a Guy With a Big…

All photos credit: HBO

What does it say that there’s now a TV show about a man with a huge penis?

That television shows have become more audacious, more deliberately shocking than ever, in order to draw attention to themselves in an era of media overload? That men are now as objectified by their body parts as women? That the male member is finally seeing the light of day?

Actually, what’s most shocking about Hung, which debuted last Sunday on HBO, is that it isn’t really all that shocking.

The show tells the story of Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane), a former high school jock who is now a high school coach, and who has come to realize just what a loser he is. His basketball team can't win a game, and his very modest house, located next to a McMansion owned by an obnoxious successful neighbor, just burned down.

“You used to have so much going for you – and you were hung!” his bitter ex-wife (Anne Heche) tells him.

“What am I now?” he asks, and she responds with the cold hard truth: “Now you’re just hung!”

Taking stock of the wreckage of his life, Drecker realizes that really is all he has going for himself. “My big dick is all I got!” he says.

So he tries to do the only thing he feels he can do to get himself out of his situation: he teams up with Tanya (played by Frasier’s Dr. Mel, Jane Adams, in a delightful, hopefully break-out performance) and attempts to become a heterosexual gigolo.

Thomas Jane and Jane Adams in "Hung"

First things first: we don’t ever see Ray’s penis – not in the first four episodes made available for preview by HBO, and probably not ever. If the producers are smart, they learned the lesson of Boogie Nights (1997), which is that after all that talk of someone’s massively-sized member, there is nothing they can show us that isn’t a letdown (or an obvious-looking prosthesis).

But there is still plenty of talk about the show’s titular character – Ray’s penis, that is.