"Tube Stake" Update I

I still haven’t seen the new HBO series, “Hung” – it debuts on Sunday – but Alessandra Stanley reviews it in today’s (6/25) New York Times and provides more information - after a fashion. “Hung” you may remember from my previous post, is the story of Ray Drecker: a lonely, unemployed, middle class man who becomes a male prostitute because he swings more pipe than Joe the plumber. According to Ms. Stanley, we never see the astounding appendage and very little of his sexual transactions. It’s not even the main character’s story, what she calls, “…the fall of the gifted athlete… a romantic-ization of failure that echoes…John Updike’s Rabbit novels.” (Sorry, Ms. Stanley, I beat you to the “Rabbit” punch) When it concentrates on him, she considers the show “slow and off-putting.” Instead, “The pace and humor pick up when Tanya enters Ray’s life.” Tanya Skagle is the mousy proofreader who becomes Ray’s pimp. A fantasy of female empowerment, she is one of the “…heroines [who] begin as losers…and work or will their way to unlikely triumph.” Perhaps, I haven’t seen the show yet, but it seems to me that a subtle clue to Tanya’s character may be hidden in her last name. Like Drecker (“dreck” is Yiddish for “shit”) Skagle could mean a skank who does Kegel exercises.

The Time’s TV critic goes on to be charmed, touched and to find sweetness in the way Ray and Tanya come together. “He’s on a on a slide down from exalted heights, she has no where to go but up.” “It’s an unlikely pairing and at times an exhilarating partnership - a “Romanc-ing the Stone” in the most unromantic of settings.” If I may review the review instead of the show (If you have any doubts, please look at the name and gloriously inflated title on the right) Ms. Stanley is wrong on two counts. First, if you’re going to pick a Kathleen Turner movie about two losers brought together by sex, it should be “Body Heat” (1981). Second, the obvious choice is a completely different movie, “Midnight Cowboy” (1969). Joe Buck, a naïve man who thinks his member gives him privileges, moves to NYC to become a male prostitute and meets the sleazy, yet streetwise, Ratso Rizzo. They bond and each, in his own fashion, takes care of the other. Ratso Rizzo, however, may not be the image of female empowerment that Alessandra Stanley had in mind.

On Sunday night, we’ll see what the creators of “Hung” had in mind. Stay tuned.