“Entourage” has always been disgusting – but no other series has impressed Hollywood as much as it

July 18, 2024

Hlike every successful television series has aged as radioactively as entourage? The eight-season HBO sitcom, which centers on fictional Hollywood star Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his circle of cronies, salesmen and hangers-on, has become synonymous with a certain kind of masculinity. For its critics entourage is basically “Toxic Masculinity: The Show” – with a fanatical worship of wealth, women’s affairs and celebrity culture thrown in for good measure. entourage In other words, a fan is quite a warning sign these days.

Based on life – or rather the lifestyle – by Mark Wahlberg (minus the history of racist hate crimes), entourage was never really a phenomenon. When HBO began broadcasting the series 20 years ago today, the US broadcaster was in the midst of a historic streak of success. entourage overlaps with The Sopranos, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, The cableAnd Curb your enthusiasm; compared to those shows, it was a crass and obnoxious interloper. Its reputation for misogyny has only grown stronger in recent years, not helped by allegations of sexual harassment against former cast members Jeremy Piven, who played Vinnie’s foul-mouthed agent Ari Gold, and Kevin Connolly, who plays Vince’s best friend/manager Eric “E” Murphy. (Both actors have denied the assault allegations.) The entourage There is no doubt now that the series was deeply and obviously problematic. And yet, all these years later, it would be wrong to dismiss the series as a mere series of its worst qualities.

Often apologists for entourage will defend it with the same banal parapet: the dubious claim that it is really a show about male friendship. In truth, it has little of value or nuance to say on this topic. Much more interesting is how entourage explores the film business – often with a kind of insider bias. The show became known for its large number of high-profile guest stars who play themselves. (entourage did not invent this trope – it was created more than a decade after The Larry Sanders Showan immeasurably smarter, wittier and classier inside showbiz satire, set the precedent.) Aside from that gimmick, the series was generally astute in its understanding of the film industry, giving fans a fictionalized look behind the scenes at, say, the difficulties of promoting a film on a talk show or what it’s like to run afoul of a bear-headed super-producer not-so-subtly named Harvey Weingard. But more than that, entourage touched on something fundamental about the way we as a culture narrate the film industry.

If you immerse yourself in cinema culture long enough, you start to question things like career trajectories or the nagging “what if” questions that adorn the history of popular cinema. What if Stanley Kubrick had been able to make his Napoleon? What if Will Smith hadn’t turned down The Matrix? entourageSet in a parallel universe where Vince Chase is as much a household name as Matt Damon, it lets us live in this kind of hypothetical reality – a reality that also turns out to be bizarrely prescient. We see how a post-Titanic James Cameron casts Vinnie in an adaptation of AquamanYears before Jason Momoa would make this happen in real life. We see Vinnie’s passion project, the Pablo Escobar crime drama Medellin (not unlike Netflix’ Narcos), turns into a career-threatening disaster. We see Vinnie come back – in the lead role of Martin Scorsese’s Gatsby (a few years before Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version), then Frank Darabont’s Ferrari (a decade before Michael Mann’s Ferrari). The fact that all the brief snippets of these fake films we see are comically and eye-wateringly awful hardly matters.

Even on a very basic level entourage is a successful exercise in vicarious wish fulfillment. Watching a group of well-to-do, rich people buy nice things and go to expensive places may not be a traditionally compelling story, but there is something kind of exciting about witnessing life being lived at the top end of the fame scale.

The first few seasons were – with reservations – very well received. “We can assume that it is not far from real life, Hollywood style,” wrote The guard in a review of the first season. “That is to say, empty, mindless and extremely appealing.” As the series progressed, however, the quality declined significantly. What was once playful and lush became leaden and indulgent. By the final season, not to mention the theatrically released sequel, any shred of credibility had evaporated. Other leading roles included Haley Joel Osment, Billy Bob Thornton and professional wrestler Ronda Rousey. entourage (2015) Vince devotes himself to filmmaking and directs an adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde set in a futuristic underground DJ scene. We’re supposed to believe this film is a masterpiece, even though the little glimpse we get makes it seem like the worst deodorant advert ever. It was awful.

Over the years, there has been much criticism of the show’s sexual and gender politics. WiredKevin McFarland of The 40 Years of Horror wrote that the series was “a reliable source of crass humor and casual misogyny and homophobia.” Refinery29Anne Cohen wrote, “Most of the women on this show are objectified to the point of absurdity.” While these complaints are valid and true, it is notable that many of entourageThe most outstanding supporting characters – the publicist Shauna, played by Goodfellas‘ Debi Mazar, Ari’s wife Melissa (Perrey Reeves), Ari’s industry enemies Barbara (Beverly D’Angelo) and Dana (Constance Zimmer) – are women. But that doesn’t exonerate anyone. (Mazar actually shed a scathing light on her time on the show, saying PeopleTV: “(Series creator Doug Ellin) wrote a really strong character, but that set was very testosterone-driven and misogynistic.”)

In her 2011 memoirs Bossy PantsComedy expert Tina Fey describes the reputation of the entire series of entourage while using a breast pump. “Over the whir of the milking machine,” she wrote, “I could almost hear my baby being lovingly cared for in the other room while Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) yelled through an SUV, ‘Yo E, have you ever fucked a girl while she’s on her period?’ I was able to do that for almost seven weeks before I ran out of milk. entourage episodes and sink into a deep depression.”

This is essentially the series in a nutshell: gross, problematic, and not particularly funny. And, of course, full of SUVs. But I’ll be damned if I haven’t seen the entire thing.