Hung is an HBO series that is old, but that doesn’t stop one from reviewing the fictions. In this case, I finished it a while ago and I had yet to write a review of the three seasons of this classic tragicomedy.
In general, we can say that the series is watchable and that it increases in intensity as its seasons go by, reaching maturity in its third and final season. It’s a pity that the series ended there, but it’s better to try to give a decent ending that lengthens for no reason. A difficult series to classify , but with an HBO stamp.
The introduction makes Hung’s intentions clear from the start. The music of ‘ The Black Keys ‘ with the theme ‘I’ll be your Man’ marks Ray’s resolution: to live on the edge no matter what is around him. This is a physical education teacher, a famous professional player who has come down and he is going through a distressing moment.
His house is in ashes, his job as an educator is in jeopardy, and his wife has left him. Thus, in a therapy meeting they tell him that each one has to exploit his attributes, his qualities to achieve success… and that is when our protagonist discovers that his is to exploit a quality that he had hidden: a big penis.
To do this, Ray wants to find a person to represent him. In this case, she will be a pimp – Tanya. The point is that he is a sad office worker with very little social life and with many emotional ups and downs. She decides to exploit Ray’s talent through the company Happiness Consultance.
All this under a discretion since his ex-wife, Jessica, should not know anything. Throughout the series other interesting characters will appear, such as Lenore ( Rebecca Creskoff) , another high-class pimp who will fight for the exploitation rights of Ray and his children. The latter always seemed filler to me; Apart from some comic situation, they never contributed anything noteworthy.
Hung, season to season
In its first season Hung alternates some good episodes with some pretty boring ones. She doesn’t find a footing, causing a huge flight from the audience. The pimp-whore relationship between Ray ( Thomas Jane ) and Tanya ( Jane Adams ), along with a very out of place Jessica ( Anne Heche ) at the beginning, were the driving force behind this first season of Hung.
An engine that did not work very well, perhaps because sometimes that 25-minute footage was not enough to tell everything the writers wanted and other times because they beat around the bush and with unnecessary details. Regardless, Tanya’s moments saved a worthy first season of Hung. It was a summer series that was around three million viewers in almost all its episodes.
The second season of Hung broke new ground for us. The average audience dropped to 2.5 million viewers. Several plots developed here. Personally, the one that seemed most accurate to me was the one about Tanya’s boyfriend, that Charlie pimp, counselor pimp. A very successful curling curl. On the other hand, we live Ray’s daily life with his co-worker, who ends up getting him into the business with a rich mature woman who falls in love with him.
Perhaps what this season did not go well with was making Jessica the protagonist, due to the problems at home, the divorce, the infidelities, her work, her bullying at work… I liked the character more as it was more secondary. Despite the fact that Anne Hache plays a decent role, I didn’t like the hysterical Jessica very much.
The third season of Hung showed that it was not a mass series. HBO decided to move the premiere from the usual June to a cold October and there the audience plummeted. In its last ten episodes, the fiction hardly remained above one million viewers. A pity, because as we said, it matured in many aspects. The new additions gave a new portrait to the series. Jason ( Stephen Amell ) and his fiancée appeared… giving us some very good comic moments. They were a very peculiar couple, more exotic than the rest of the characters. They as a couple relieved the dramatic scenes of the series. Remembering that Sandee prostituting her boyfriend for a television… an unbeatable moment!
Jason was a very flat character, a typical teenager. But when he slept with Lenore, his life changed. She wanted to prostitute him and he agreed almost immediately. His business of stealing Ray’s clients gave rise to very hilarious scenes and that’s when the series began to settle down, to mature. That spiteful ending of Jason’s girlfriend Sandee killing Lenore is one of the best series finales I can remember, albeit a very confusing one at the same time.
Finally, to say that Hung is a series that shows the monotony of the human being like no other. A series that started very hesitantly, with some very irregular episodes. Over time, in its second season it reaches a young maturity and in its third, Hung, a pretty good plot line is marked. A risky, different series, with three seasons and thirty episodes. That’s Hung.