I confess I wasn't going to watch this show.

HBO's new weekly series Hung sounded like a weak excuse for lots of sophomoric jokes about penis size and plenty of pretty men and pretty women in various stages of undress, all chasing each other around and dropping their drawers easily and often.

In other words, jiggle and giggle. It's a classic TV formula and the backbone (so to speak) of the genre of farce, but not really my cup of tea.

But, I was wrong.

(It happens!)

Hung is thoughtful, witty, and out there, but not that far out there...actually it's only about two hours east of where I live.

Hung is shot in Detroit, (did you know that Michigan is fast becoming the new Hollywood? True story. Watch this space for upcoming hub details.) The title has a double meaning: Hung, as in generously endowed, and Hung as in 'hung out to dry', twisting in the wind, executed, destroyed, hanged by yer neck until dead, etc, etc.

It's a kind of a reverse double entendre: You think about the equipment first, and then you realize there's this subtle reference to the pickle in which many of us Michiganders currently find ourselves--the economic one, the one that turned Detroit into the Ground Zero in the U.S. economic meltdown. Remember Detroit? It's that place right next to Canada where you can buy a house for $1,000 but no one in their right mind wants one. I think they used to make cars there.

The main characters in Hung are Ray Dreckle, a recently divorced coach and history teacher forced to live in his parent's burned-out lake cottage, and Tanya Skagle, a poet who works degrading temp jobs by day and introspects publicly between gigs, although not all that effectively. Both Ray and Tanya (played by actors Thomas Jayne and Jane Adams) are in desperate need of both money and a new life.

These economically-challenged and emotionally adrift losers meet at one of those horrible career coaching seminars that are held in motel meeting rooms and run by guys (or gals) in navy blue suits and red ties. You know the ones I mean: those slick yet lame pep talks wherein people who don't have a job themselves (except for the job of telling you how to get one) collect a big fee to urge you to 'own' your predicament and follow your dreams. And rots a ruck! That'll be $500.

Tanya's dream is something called 'Lyric Bread,' a line of baked goods with bits of great poetry baked inside them (kind of like really upscale, really annoying fortune cookies--imagine a Starbucks cup with a muffin baked around it); while Ray has no dream, not really. Ray's entire life is in the process of being flushed before his very eyes, and what Ray mostly dreams about these days is wads and wads of cash so he can fixed his fire damaged living quarters (he let the insurance lapse after the divorce) and get his Yuppie Scum neighbor off his back.

Tanya and Ray have quick meaningless sex after the first career seminar meeting, and then Ray flakes out of the whole life coaching trip, but not before Tanya hatches the scheme of marketing Ray's dick in addition to her literary muffins.

The best thing about this contrived plot is not that we get to watch the misadventures of a male prostitute who by day is just another insecure Detroit school teacher (at least one of Ray's colleagues falls prey to budget cuts almost every week), but rather that it gives the writers a chance to explore the changing American landscape of work, dreams, and the status quo in ways that are both wry and insightful.

The relationship that develops between Roy and Tanya goes beyond 'lovable loser' cliches to directly address the question of what happens when all you have left to sell is your body and, truth to tell, you're not even all that great at that?

It's an intentional metaphor, and a funny and poignant one at that.

The way these two relate to each other and to the perilous and disintegrating world of failure, loss, and relentlessly slamming doors that surrounds them is a fresh and entertaining take on the current plight of working class Americans.

I know both of these people. So do you.

They're worth watching.