In the period since Entourage debuted, 20 years ago Thursday, the show’s been discussed as a time capsule full of many different things, most of which the excavators would like to forget: unexamined male chauvinism; pre-recession financial optimism; a Hollywood whose ’90s excesses were continuing to balloon toward a point of obvious untenability; the worst fashion ever captured on film. And so any remembrance of Entourage is colored by the debate over the degree to which it was in on its own joke. But the truth, which was made very plain while crash-rewatching the entire series over the past couple of weeks, is that in almost all instances, the show understands precisely the ways its characters, and their lives, are ridiculous.
It’s not satire—not exactly—but rather a durable comedy about the ways beautiful people try to exert agency over a totally arbitrary world. The show, created by Doug Ellin and executive produced by Mark Wahlberg, on whose career and social circle it is very loosely based, was a product of HBO’s vaunted, arduous development process. The version of Ellin’s pilot that was first pitched to the network was much darker in tone, closer to the show’s seventh season than its first few seasons.
And executives weren’t sure how Ellin would work around a very simple, practical challenge: how to cast the lead. If there’s someone out there who looks like a movie star and can act well enough to carry an HBO series, the logic went, why isn’t he a .