Hung Review
Watching HBO’s new series Hung it’s difficult to shake the feeling that AMC’s Breaking Bad is currently mining similar territory to much deeper and stronger effect.
Both shows feature washed-up, middle-aged protagonists who are currently dying inside as they teach high school.
Like Bryan Cranston’s Walt White, Thomas Jane’s Ray Drecker has a teaching monologue early on.
In a telling commentary on the literally telling difference between the two shows Walt’s monologue has the subtext of being a hoorah speech about chemistry. He’s trying to fire up his students (and in fact literally lights a fire during the speech) to lackluster effect.
For Hung that monologue is literally a hoorah speech, Drecker’s the basketball couch and gives a sadly desperate speech to his perpetually losing team.
From there the show gradually traces Drecker’s personal decline, he loses his house, his kids, and clearly more than a little of his personal dignity. Finally he decides to become a male prostitute, as the result of an insult delivered by Tanya, a poet who Ray sleeps with.
As cannily underplayed by Jane Adams, Tanya is a great foil to Ray, who comes off as a bummed out “cool dad” type in Thomas Jane’s hands. Adams could easily have overdone her reactions to Thomas Jane’s silly ideas, but she does a nice job coming off believably in an unbelievable situation.
The show is perfectly pleasant and funny, and it feels like no coincidence Alexander Payne directed, the sort of enjoyably comic but recognizably sad world of middle-aged men in Sideways seems like a natural complement to the tone of Hung.
But in a lot of ways the show feels safe, especially after watching Breaking Bad, whose dark subtext (getting cancer and dealing chemo was the best thing that ever happened to Walt White, and he’s not just doing it for the money) seems far more challenging and intriguing than the similar subtext (spelled out in a persistent expository voiceover) in Hung.
AMC’s series is both more subtle and affecting, its darkness the jagged edge to Hung‘s comfy blanket.
HBO, Showtime and FX have all fallen into a sort of cliched niche, where protagonists end up in crazy situations played straight, with the edge thrown in almost as an afterthought.
In Breaking Bad it’s an integral part of the show. In Hung there’s not really any edge at all, which is FINE. But it makes the show just easy, almost like watching a sitcom, compared to the dark night of the soul plumbed in its crazy sister show Breaking Bad.