Warm-hearted tale of an ordinary guy and the tool of his trade

It is almost guaranteed that a show called Hung is going to attract an audience, even if it's only for the first episode to size it up.

Hung is based around Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane), a high school basketball coach who has hit rock bottom. It's the usual story: he used to be something, he'd won a sports scholarship to college and married the homecoming queen, but now he's divorced and the best he can do is a two-bit coaching job of a team on a losing streak.

But it doesn't totally follow the formula. On the upside his twins, Damon and Darby – who weren't your usual American beauties – had decided to live with him, until his house burnt down and they decided to go to mum's rather than live in a tent.

Ray didn't have insurance and his financial woes were getting worse.

Desperate to make some extra money, Ray went to one of those get-rich-quick seminars and was told to think up his "winning tool". A woman who had come to teach poetry in one of his classes, Tanya, was also there and they had slept together in the past, which got old Ray thinking.

His ex-wife (Ann Heche) had told him the only thing he still had going for him was that he was "hung", so Ray put an ad in the paper.

Now the laughs would surely come, especially when the get-rich-quick guru wanted details on Ray's "winning tool" and he began to tell the group. Or so we thought, until he confessed he told the group he really liked vintage cars and wanted to be a mechanic. Nevertheless, Ray was on his way to his first appointment, knocked on the door and introduced himself as Big Donnie. Unfortunately, his client took two looks through the peephole and slipped a note under the door saying she had changed her mind. She also slipped him $50 for his trouble.

Tanya (Jane Adams) dropped by his tent and found out what he was up to. She, obviously bored with life as a poet, suggested she could help him market himself (be his pimp) and no doubt many more appointments with all sorts of women will be set up.

I'm not sure what I was expecting – perhaps something trying to be a bit clever with lots of desperate woman paying for a bit of action, plenty of silly humour and a token attempt at a serious story.

But Hung had more depth than that. It focused more on the size of Ray's problems than his appendage and was a lot more human, with plenty of faults and black humour thrown in.

Often these sports coaches can be a bit formulaic, but you actually began to feel a bit sorry for Ray. The fact he took the $50 and gave it to his son for a concert ticket he desperately wanted showed he was prepared to put his kids before his pride.

Phallic symbols and inevitable puns aside, it's a warm-hearted story about an ordinary guy thinking he's halfway through his life and doesn't have much to show for it.

He's spicing up the ride. I just wonder how long it will be before his ex-wife is one of his clients.

- © Fairfax NZ News