Entourage Television Program

When making a television series about yourself and your friends, the hardest part is making sure the stories are entertaining to others. The next hardest part is making them fit into a half-hour. And when the town you and your friends inhabit is Hollywood, it really helps if the community likes it. "This could be humiliating in this town if we didn't get it right," said Doug Ellin, executive producer and creator of "Entourage," one of HBO's few remaining hit original series.

Mrs. Ari, the smart, fearless wife of fictional Hollywood agent Ari Gold, doesn't even have an official first name. But Perrey Reeves, the actress who plays her on HBO's "Entourage," isn't complaining. The series, after all, is about four young guys trying to make it in the land of film and money. Her character, who comes on particularly strong in Season 3 (starting Sunday ), is an extension of her obnoxious, neurotic husband, Reeves says. "I love it. That's how the boys see me," she says.

VINCENT CHASE wins because no one's ever told him he couldn't. He (like Adrian Grenier, who plays him) has piercing eyes, tousled hair, slightly pudgy cheeks and an easy gait. Ostensibly, he can act, but mostly he's a sort-of sexual idiot savant, unable to control or ignore his primal pull on women. Much like its protagonist, "Entourage" is easy and carefree and blithe.

"Don't pitch inside. Audiences don't care about the industry." So one screenwriter recently cautioned me about proposing a network series. With police procedurals, franchises and reality contests dominating prime time, this wisdom makes some sense. Yet program schedules are loaded with shows-about-the-business. This genre includes prestige serials like HBO's "Entourage" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Aaron Sorkin's upcoming "Studio 60" and Steven Spielberg's auteurs-in-the-making "On the Lot."

Readers of Monday's Variety could be forgiven for thinking they had been in the dark about the biggest movie of the year. Huge letters spread across two pages in the Hollywood trade publication declared that the new James Cameron film "Aquaman," starring Vincent Chase, was the "biggest box office splash in history," racking up an astounding $116 million in its opening weekend.

A few hours after dawn, a group of extras suited up to play members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and assembled on a tennis court at a Beverly Hills mansion -- the location for Episode 8 of HBO's industry insider "Entourage." "Just remember," instructed the second second assistant director, "They want everyone to know what Hollywood is like ... on TV." The cast chuckled knowingly.

"Entourage" is the breeziest and most watchable of the HBO half-hours set inside the belly of Hollywood, chipper about life where "The Comeback" is a bummer, and much less egocentric than "Curb Your Enthusiasm." But some 20 episodes into a show about a budding movie star and his misfit posse from the old neighborhood in Queens (a riff, apparently, on executive producer Mark Wahlberg's working-class-Boston-to-Hollywood bildungsroman), I'm still waiting for the series to become full-blooded.