HUNG. 10 p.m. Sunday, HBO.

FROM THE MOMENT HBO first announced it had picked up a show about a high school basketball coach with one slightly out of the ordinary physical feature - and that it was calling it "Hung" - the jokes and double entendres have been flying.

Everywhere, apparently, but the show's writers room where, executive producers Colette Burson and Dmitry Lipkin insist, things weren't nearly that juvenile.

Everyone asks how many penis jokes get told, Burson said Monday in a conference call with reporters (who hadn't actually asked and where she employed a more colloquial expression), and "the answer is zero . . . we never deal with that."

"A penis isn't very intellectually interesting at the end of the day," she said. "We always came at it from a socio-economic point of view."

Set in Detroit against the backdrop of a sagging economy, "Hung" stars Thomas Jane (HBO's "61*") as Ray Drecker, a divorced, down-on-his-luck teacher and coach who turns to prostitution to bolster his income after a series of very bad breaks.

It's the kind of premise that might easily have found a home on Showtime, which in recent years has found room for sympathetic portrayals of a pot-selling suburban mom ("Weeds"), a serial killer ("Dexter") and a womanizing writer ("Californication").

Or even on AMC, which turned another cash-strapped teacher (Bryan Cranston) into a meth dealer in "Breaking Bad."

HBO is calling "Hung" a "dark comedy," but at times it feels not only dark to the point of genuine sadness, but like a puzzle, with a title that's as likely to repel people who might like the show as it is to attract viewers who'll turn away once they realize all this talk about Ray's distinguishing characteristic is a bit of a tease.

Lipkin, who's married to Burson and whose previous show, FX's "The Riches," starred Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as con artists who stole a dead couple's identities and moved their family into a McMansion, said he and Burson "never thought about really changing" the show's title.

"We didn't know what we'd change it to," he said.

"We started with this idea that it's about this guy who used to be this quintessential insider . . . What's it like being that guy, and what's it like being that guy 20 years down the road?" Lipkin said. "The 'Hung' of it came from that."

And, OK, from this.

"Whenever you're around a guy who is hung, sooner or later they drop a reference to that," Burson said, in explaining the origins of the idea.

So, when they first started talking about writing something about a guy who'd come down in the world, they decided he'd be that guy, the one who once had everything and is now down to one of the few possessions money can't buy.

"He had all of life's aces and I think they've all been taken away, except for that," she said.

"We're also amused by the bluntness of the metaphor," Lipkin added. "There's a certain upfrontness to the title."

"I don't think anything in 'Hung' is really salacious," Burson said. "If we weren't more than just a gross joke, I think someone like Alexander Payne would never have been interested in the material."

Payne, who directed "Sideways," for which he won an Oscar for adapted screenplay, is an executive producer on "Hung" and directed Sunday's premiere.

Anne Heche plays Ray's neurotic, upwardly mobile ex, and Jane Adams is Tanya, a poet and office temp whose struggle to keep her own economic foothold, leads her to offer herself as Ray's pimp.

"The marketing for 'Hung' is very different, say, than the market for 'Hangover,' " Burson said. "The ones just looking for yuks should be able to tell from the advertising that it's not that."

But the opening title sequence of "Hung" demonstrates the tightrope HBO's walking between the obvious jokes and the deeper meaning Burson and Lipkin talk about.

It shows Jane as Drecker, walking through Detroit, gradually discarding his clothes. He eventually makes his way to a modest home on Lake Michigan, where he strips down to his boxers then walks out onto a dock before dropping them, too, then plunging into the water.

Despite a splash of rear nudity - nothing we didn't see on "NYPD Blue" - the sequence is reminiscent of "The Sopranos," in which a homeward-bound Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) weekly drove through North Jersey.

Yet it's undeniably also a striptease.

With the emphasis on tease.

When it comes to full frontal nudity and Ray, "we never say never," Lipkin said. "We have some ideas about what we might do later."

"The theater of the mind is very powerful," added Burson. Plus, "we don't think of him as porn-star size. We think of him as really well-hung."

In her mind, "it's sort of like Plato's penis, the platonic penis . . . When a woman sees it, it's her ideal penis," Burson said.

Showing the viewers why could only shatter the illusion, she hinted.

"In a way, there's no way to make the audience happy. It's either going to be too big or too small." *

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