HBO's Hung Premieres With One Big D*ck Of A Pilot

Judging a new tv series based on the pilot is as premature and fruitless as judging a Woody Allen film by the introductory voiceover, so I'll reserve any serious judgment of HBO's new show Hung until we're a few episodes in. But that being said, last night's pilot was, for lack of an accurate term without an obviously negative connotation, pretty boring.

Rather than drone on with a bunch of paragraphs I don't even feel particularly strong about (plus I'm not sure what the title of this post means, just sounded appropriate), here are my random thoughts about last night's Hung premiere — feel free to leave your own in the comments:

– An HBO show about a male prostitute premieres without a single boob in the pilot?? I'm assuming HBO used up its ‘09 'Shoehorning Boobs In There' budget on True Blood and the next Entourage season.

– Thomas Jane was fine, although — and I know I've said this before and it's becoming less and less of a joke each time — I'd almost rather actually watch the series Homeless Dad. Jane's character actually did lose custody of his kids in the Hung pilot, but resisted the temptation to throw us a bone with one little fourth-wall-breaking 'I just want my kids back' line.

– For a reputed comedy, there weren't really a lot of jokes in the first episode. I don't mean the show elicited any 'What, you call that a joke?? NOT FUNNY' reactions, just that it literally didn't seem to really be much of a comedy. I'll chalk that up to pilot-syndrome, because the show sure had a lot of exposition to cover, but I laughed through the entire Eastbound and Down premiere and that was also full of at least three seconds of non-joking setup.

– A friend of mine pointed out the semi-datedness of the parent-goth kid theme and the even more datedness of physically waiting in line for concert tickets; coupled with the fact that Jane's character deals in magazines and classifieds and only briefly on some dated-looking search engine, my friend hypothesized that the pilot was written a handful of years ago and was never updated. I don't recall them ever mentioning a specific date in the show, but everything seemed just vaguely dated. That and the fact that they kept using 1-800-CALL-ATT.

– There's just no way to cram the title of a tv show into the show dialogue without it sounding deliberately awkward. 'You used to be smart, driven, popular, HUNG… but now, you're just HUNG.'

– I'm genuinely intrigued to see how long this premise can possibly sustain itself with new, non-repetitive dilemmas. Once Thomas Jane shows up to a client who turns out to be a student at his school, and he tries to keep the news from leaking out, I'm not sure where the show will go from there. I assume this will happen three seconds into Episode Two.

So yeah, in general, it was a super pilot-y pilot that didn't really convince me definitively whether or not it'll be worth watching, and it's still HBO, so I guess I'll have to continue DVRing it. Because God forbid, with no network shows running and most sports done for the season, I actually go out and enjoy my summer in an active and productive manner. [SHUDDER]