I thoroughly enjoy the HBO show Entourage.  I’m not going to put it on a list of best shows of all time, but I definitely enjoy spending a half-hour a week with this crowd.  Having tried myself to sell some screenplays, I particularly enjoy the inside baseball treatment of the film industry as star Vinnie Chase goes from project to project with the help of his agent Ari, manager Eric, brother Drama and driver/friend Turtle.

The show gives a better view of the process of creating Hollywood entertainment than any other I’ve seen, mainly because it takes on its subject without the moralizing and handwringing (under the flimsy cover of satire) that marks films such as The Player.  Hollywood has been mythologized (mainly by those in Hollywood) but the bottom line is that it is just another industry filled with normal people trying to make a living.  True, on average those people are probably more high-strung and occasionally more creative than the run-of-the-mill, but it is still just a business with a product that happens to sometimes seem larger than life because it unspools on giant screens worldwide.  And there can be a lot of money involved, of course.

But the core of Entourage is that it is a story about male friendship, Sex and the City with testosterone.  Again, the cast and the writing staff do a wonderful job of drawing this out, and I wouldn’t watch the show if it wasn’t grounded in these characters.  Yet, I realized an odd thing as I started to write this post.  This is a show about friends, which I happen to like, despite the fact that I don’t think I would be friends with any of them.

That got me thinking about other shows I’ve liked in the past about groups of friends.  Of course, I’ll start with Friends, which is kind of the title track for this sub-genre.  I probably would have been fed up with all of them in a couple of weeks.  I like my friends a little less self-absorbed and less whiny.  And yet I watched the entire run of the series.  Ditto with Seinfeld.  I don’t think I could handle the misanthropic navel-gazing and narcissism in the real world but a rarely missed an episode.  My wife and I watched the aforementioned Sex in the City — those women would never have talked to me.

So what does it say about me that I like to watch TV shows about friends who probably wouldn’t be friends with me?  OK, it probably doesn’t say much at all.

You know who I would have been friends with — Jamie and Paul from Mad About You.  I could completely see my wife and I hanging out with Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser.  Loved that show too.

But back to Entourage.  In real life, I would probably find the struggles of these characters to be ridiculous tabloid fodder that wouldn’t interest me much.  On TV, I’m pulling for them.  I guess there’s a lesson for me in there as a writer.  I’ll let you know when I figure out what it is.  In the meantime, I’ve got an Entourage on the DVR to watch.