We start with our main character, Ray (Thomas Jane), trying to pep talk his high school team in the locker room. He's babbling away, something about the unfair workload of a dung beetle, and all the teenage boys are staring at him glumly, in that teen way that says "all adults are stupid".
Ray encourages them that, even though the season thus far has completely sucked, they can still win. Go team! Then Ray grabs an assistant coach, fakes illness and leaves. Hello?
Seems Ray is off to his first gig as a hired stud. Hurray! We're finally to the part of the show you know we all really tuned in for: naughtiness involving Ray's heavily-promoted appendage. But Ray's voice over tells us that, first, we're going to see what led up to his joining the man-whore industry. I'm a little disappointed with the teasing, but hey, I've just opened a fresh beer, I'm good.
Ray was on a promising path to major sports hero status, when an injury ruined all that. Awww. Ray was happily married until his wife decided she needed some more pocket money and ran off with a doctor. Darn the luck.
And of course, the divorce is a messy and such, lots of anger and shouting, with Anne Hech playing The Ex. She even wants the rose bushes. (Well, her MOTHER wants the rose bushes. Mom turns out to be quite the whippersnapper.) The only bright spot in the ordeal is that the kids want to live with Ray.
Which they do. Until the house burns, and Ray, having no insurance, decides they can live in tents in the back yard. (With a view of the lake!) This is SO not cool, and the kids scamper back to Momma, opting to live with Celestia and possible snatching by spaceship rather than an eternal Boy Scout Jamboree.
(Side Note: During all the flashbacks, Anne Heche gets to utter the line "I am shallow because I choose to be." I think I'll get a t-shirt made.)
Notice the pattern? They are piling it on really thick (Freudian of me?) that lots of really bad things have happened to Ray, so we can be empathetic when he makes the choice to sell his stick. Not really necessary. Lots of other businessmen have preceded him in that particular trade. We TUNED IN fully knowing his career choice. Enough already.
So anyway, Ray attends some entrepreneurial training, which gets him thinking about his assets. He runs into and re-hooks with a past girlfriend, Tanya, who also gets him thinking about his assets. And gets her thinking as well. He can go in the man trade, and she can be his pimp. How convenient and exciting!
By the way, Tanya is trying to develop her own product, "Lyric Bread", where she puts slips of paper with quotations into baked goods. But she's having issues with the ink running and being unreadable during the baking. Would you have ever guess THAT would happen?
Ray takes this all in and does some research, googling "how to make money with a large penis", and creating an alternate personality for his hooker ads named "Big Donnie". And we finally catch up to him abandoning his brooding high-school team during a game so he can go on his first gig as a paid stud.
Only to have the prospective buyer not even open the hotel door, instead slipping him a note that he/she is not interested after reviewing him through the peephole. Ray goes into a little monologue about the suckage of life, and lo and behold, the client slips a 50-dollar bill under the door.
And Ray then gives the money to his son so he can buy tickets to a Goth concert in a seedy part of town. Roll credits.
Despite all my smarminess above (it's what I do, people, it's in the blood), I actually really liked the show. It's being promoted as something of a comedy. It's really not, there are some cute and amusing moments but very few belly laughs. Instead, it's actually warm and character-driven. Thomas Jane is quite good, but so are most of the actors around him. Feels like a good fit. Time will tell.
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