Hung

This week’s New Yorker has a review about the new HBO series of my title’s title, created by husband-and-wife team of Dmitry Lipkin and Colette Burson, who also wrote three of the first four episodes and are executive producers.
Nancy Franklin, the reviewer, concludes: “It’s not yet possible to tell where ‘Hung’ is going—I’ve seen four episodes out of the season’s ten—but at this point it reminds me a little too much, in tone and substance, of a couple of recent high-concept cable series, in which characters, with an ease that is supposed to strike us as questionable and yet understandable, cross the line between legal and illegal, making us ask ourselves whether the line is in the right place. You’ve got Showtime’s ‘Weeds,’ in which a respectable adult turns to drug dealing. You’ve got AMC’s ‘Breaking Bad,’ in which a high-school teacher turns to drugmaking. And you’ve got Showtime’s ‘Dexter’ (a forensics expert who’s also a serial killer) and Showtime’s ‘Nurse Jackie’ (a drug-addicted R.N. who steals pills from the hospital pharmacy and uses while on duty). ‘Hung’ is timely, but strangely superficial. It doesn’t really examine the American dream; it just tickles it.”
This got me to thinking about that legal/illegal line and the way things are now. A TV show about crossing the line is sort of light weight in timew when financial institutions used the rewriting of what was legal (with deregulation) to achieve what is often thought of when you hear the words “the American dream” -- getting rich. Of course you still have people like Madoff who use the old-fashioned, illegal methods, too. And that is where we get to the American passion for outlaws [although I wonder if it is a sexist infatuation, we seem taken with “bad boys” but ” (the phrase only calls to mind a Donna Summer song) except for a few “bad girls” – a character on another HBO show, Brenda on “Six Feet Under” and her sex-compulsion is the only one I can come up with quickly – women outlaws are not as featured/exploited to create the romance].
I recalled the New Yorker review when I read Frank Rich today in the NY Times: his take on the financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Wall Street and “Public Enemies” the Johnny Depp/Christian Bale new movie about John Dillinger. In his editorial Rich refers to “Dillinger’s Wild Ride,” by Elliott J. Gorn, a professor of history at Brown University. In Gorn’s book, Rich says “you learn that ordinary law-abiding Americans even wrote letters to newspapers and politicians defending Dillinger’s assault on banks. ‘Dillinger did not rob poor people,’ wrote one correspondent to The Indianapolis Star. ‘He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor.’”
Given the cult fiction of romance around outlaws and the current state of affairs, maybe “Hung” is what’s needed: a tickler for America’s dreams with a sexual hook that drags in our naughty focus on that natural thing, sex; A chance to escape the uncontrolled life and fixate on someone who is as helpless as we feel, using his “talent” to screw someone else, revenge for how we have been screwed.