Monday, August 01, 2005

Cherchez la Scenariste

The HBO show Entourage is growing on me. I didn't like it much last season. The four main characters, womanizing jackasses, were not people I was interested in spending time with. Either I've mellowed or the show has: more time this season has been spent on their career and life choices, and while the characters are still womanizing jackasses they also seem callow and vulnerable, dare I say endearing.

Entourage has featured all manner of genus and species from the Hollywood food chain: actors, agents, managers, publicists, corporate publicists, producers, studio execs, hangers-on, assistants of all stripes, real estate agents, interior decorators, high-priced hookers, maitre d's, valets.

And no writers.

Scripts make an appearance, debated, touted, denigrated, or read at high speed zooming down Wilshire by Jeremy Piven's land shark Ari Gold, but not the people who put the words on the page.

This, I submit, is weird, even if some of the show's best moments were improvised ("Hug it out, bitch!"). Is the absence of writer characters an elaborate, bitter in-joke by the show's own writing staff? An inadvertent and ironic reality check? An intentional televised wedgie? You make the call.

1 comment:

Fun Joel said...

A very interesting and perhaps telling point, Kira! Of course, it's relatively par for the course, in terms of the respect that writers get in H'wood (or lack thereof).