'Hung' and the gluten-free Neruda cranberry-walnut bread

Tonight, HBO will premiere Hung, its latest attempt at a half-hour sitcom since it forgot Eastbound & Down was as good as Sex and the City. Hung is about Ray, a high-school athletics coach, a middle-aged divorced dad, most of whose house has recently burned down. He's strapped for cash, his kids and ex-wife more or less hate him. Desperate, Ray attends a make-your-dreams-come-true motivational speech in which he's urged to find his essential talent to achieve success. Or in the words of the speaker, to "identify your own tool." If you take that phrase and the show's title, are you surprised when I say the show is about Ray and his gigantic penis?

Yes, this is the essentially one-joke premise of Hung. Ray becomes, in the words of one character, a "man-whore," servicing women for money. But that character is more interesting than Ray. She's Tanya, a poet. A poet who's also in the identify-your-tool class, and whose own get-rich-tediously idea is something she calls "lyric bread": "a croissant folded around Maya Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman', or a raisin loaf with Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' swirled in." She also suggests a "gluten-free Neruda cranberry walnut bread." Says the motivational leader: "Food for the body, food for the soul: I like it!" Ray, who is dubious, advises her to "laminate the poems" so they don't melt in the bread. 

Tanya and Ray unite because Tanya, who had a one-night fling with Ray some time ago, knows his "tool" truly is something special, and says she's "hoping to give women more than they've been seeing for centuries." In other words, says Ray, you "want to be my pimp." Correct, says Tanya.

Tanya is played by the wonderful Jane Adams, whom you may recall as one of Niles' girlfriends on Frasier. Adams has huge eyes and a low voice and redeems a lot of the lousy penis jokes. Looking at advance reviews of Hung, I find my Entertainment Weekly review leaves me in the minority. Other reveiwers are more impressed with the show, and find in it metaphors for and comparisons to a deflated economy.

It occurs to me that the ideal reviewer for Hung may be Nin Andrews, who would bring her own special talent to bear on Hung. It would also be interesting to hear how other poets react to Tanya and her poetry bread. Let me know if you watch. And if you'd buy "lyric bread." 

--Ken Tucker

Comments

[Nin Andrews]

Sadly, I didn't watch Hung. We don't get HBO, and our TV is on the fritz. So I can't comment on the show.

I have to confess, I've never been very aware of what is happening on TV. I grew up without one. And once, when a friend referred to a woman as a real June Cleaver, I asked if June Cleaver was Eldridge Cleaver's mother. (I've still never seen Leave It to Beaver.)

Yeah, I've said a few dumb things in my time. So when TV is the topic, I usually keep my mouth zippered.

Penises on the other hand, I might be able to comment on. I am reminded of how my French professor said once that the French had a whole assortment of words for them. I imagined that maybe there was a guidebook to penises, available only in France. You know how the French are. So much more liberated than we are. Or so the French always tell me. My French professor also said breasts had many names. Large breasts, for example, were called a balcony to the world. But what of a large penis? I wondered. Would they call it an airplane to heaven? Or a jet plane? Or maybe a mere ski jump? I'm not sure I've found the perfect metaphor. Like the perfect penis. But I'm keeping a parachute handy, just in case.

[DL]

Could this be the ideal show -- a distraction if not an antidote -- for those times when the taker of Viagra or Cialis has one of those four-hour erections that seem to be popular these days?

[Sally Ashton]

It's also sad to think how they might create a metaphor for a deflated economy; the poetry or the penis? Sad either way.