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

The first episode literally opens in a high school locker room. The first few episodes are peppered with overt references to Ray’s dick, but also with sly, covert winks to the audience about what the show – and the main character – is really all about.

When Ray attends a seminar on how to get rich quick, the instructor encourages him to find his “winning tool.” That’s just one of the show’s many double entendres.

So given the outrageous concept, why hasn’t there been any fuss? No boycotts by “family values” groups, no outraged media critics?

Part of it is that it’s playing on premium cable, on HBO, which means there are no advertisers to upset, and that presumably no one will be watching it who doesn’t want to be watching it.

But it’s also that Hung isn’t nearly as revolutionary, or as shocking, as it sounds. Cable television long ago “crossed the Rubicon” into sexually explicit talk, with shows such as HBO’s Sex and the City, Oxygen’s Talk Sex With Sue Johansen – not to mention all those long-running late-night commercials for Girls Gone Wild.

And dark, complicated, sometimes unsympathetic, loser main characters willing to do anything to change their luck? Weeds, the Showtime show about the housewife who takes up pot dealing, “went there” long before Hung. Then Breaking Bad, AMC’s blisteringly bleak (but brilliant) show about a high school chemistry teacher who starts cooking up crystal meth, kicked that ball much, much farther down the field.

Provocative title aside, Hung fits right in on a television landscape that includes pill-popping Nurse Jackie on Showtime, and even last summer’s Swingtown (on CBS, no less), about what happens to a 70s neighborhood when a couple of wife-swapping swingers move in.

In short, thanks to the bifurcated nature of cable versus broadcast television, American audiences have finally been allowed to “grow up” and enjoy adult-oriented shows about edgy, provocative subjects that they’ve been watching in movie theaters ever since the 1960s.

What of all this talk of penises? That’s something new on television, isn’t it?

Sort of. Attention still isn’t paid to the male member the way it is to female body parts, especially breasts. It seems that heterosexual men still call the shots, in Hollywood and elsewhere.