by Tim Williams
Entourage, for those of you that don’t know, has just finished its fifth season and tells the story of heartthrob Hollywood actor Vincent Chase and his entourage (Perfect title for the show huh?) and is apparently loosely based on the life of Mark Wahlberg (yeah right, is Mark Wahlberg really this cool? He did just star as the lead in the recent movie adaptation of video game Max Payne you know?) Entourage could be described as a ‘sleeper hit’ as it has slowly wormed its way into the consciousness of the entire world after a fairly low key beginning. Personally, I think it’s a great show and I can’t speak highly enough of it, although I feel like the last season was slowing down a bit (probably why the next season will be the last). My favourite episode is the one where they go to Las Vegas – check that one out if you need a starting point.
Predictably I was one of the first to introduce people of England to the show after picking up on it when I used to live in Toronto with a bunch of college guys. We were probably the show’s target audience (BOYS WILL BE BOYS) and this led to such statements as ‘Oh man, I’ve got my finals tomorrow but I just downloaded a whole season ofEntourage and I can’t stop watching it! Fuck’ being uttered with increasing regularity (this particular American ended up back in St Louis the following semester, not too much of a surprise there). It was also unusual to walk down a corridor (it didn’t matter which one it was THAT big) and not hear Jane’s Addiction being blasted from one of the rooms (they do the theme music) and the smell of a joint being sparked up. So just what was it aboutEntourage that had such universal appeal?
In short, that old adage BOYS WILL BE BOYS explains it all (not Clarissa this time guys). An old dear friend once remarked to me that it was simply a version of Sex and The City for boys, and although I didn’t see this at first I slowly began to work my way around to this logic. I mean every girl loves Sex and The City right, that is pretty much a given. Why is that though? Probably because each character perfectly depicts a different woman that everyone knows and can identify with and arguably whose personalities can be reflected as facets of most modern women’s personalities: slut (yeah I put that one first), girl who just wants to get married, girl who has a career and girl who loves shoes. So yeah now we have these characters what do we do? Let’s put them in the ideal situation that most girls want to be in all the time: having coffee/food and complaining about their sex lives. Minimise scenes with work in (unless it has something to do with a relationship in the workplace) and throw in a bit of a sex action and some vaguely emotional scenes and BOOM you’ve got an institution of modern television! Darren Starr you are a genius – notice that Sex and The City was created by a man – and yeah all you smartasses at the back I do know it was based on a book.
But how does this relate to Entourage? It seems fairly clear to me someone at HBO said to Doug Elin, ‘Yo, we need a male Sex and The City’. So Doug Elin thinks ‘what does every guy want?’. Well the answer is pretty simple, to be rich and famous and fuck loads of girls….join the dots…damn, we’ll make a TV show about BEING A MOVIE STAR. Perfect. Then we’ll surround the movie star with a stoner (another male fantasy), a guy who’s always right (another one), a guy who gets angry and shouts a lot and belittles people (whoa, there’s another one) and Johnny Drama (couldn’t work out what he was supposed to represent…the wisdom of age? Figured he’s just comic relief, as he’s fucking hilarious but I don’t think anyone would want to BE HIM), throw in a bit of sex and a lot of arguing and some celebrity cameos from the likes of James Cameron, Seth Green and Scarlett Johannson and what have you got? The hottest show since Sex and The City – only this time it’s a different demographic -and the success ofEntourage probably is proof that BOYS WILL BE BOYS. The effect seems to have been almost universal as it has slowly but surely integrated itself into all of my different friendship groups (for the record I have quite a few) and I’ve lost count of the number of times there’s been a discussion about who in the room matches the characters inEntourage. It’s just unfortunate that the universal decision seems to always be that I would be Turtle.
