“Entourage” creator Doug Ellin said a “wave of righteous PC culture” is to blame for the HBO comedy’s declining reputation in recent years, defending the series as an accurate representation of how men in Hollywood behaved at the time.
“I resent it tremendously,” Ellin said in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment when asked about HBO’s “skittishness” around the series. “Nobody says that about ‘The Sopranos,’ where they murder people, that maybe we should readdress whether murdering people on TV is OK. … There needs to be a reckoning and social injustices need to [be addressed] in certain ways, but just attacking every single thing that comes out is, in my mind, very dangerous.”
“Entourage” ran for eight seasons on HBO, winning multiple Emmys across its run and returning for a critically panned movie in 2015. Loosely based on the relationship between Mark Wahlberg and his circle of friends, the series has since been reprimanded for its misogynistic portrayal of women and glorification of abusive workplace behavior.
“I don’t want to sound obnoxious or that I’m looking at ‘Entourage’ as high art, but it was a pretty accurate portrayal of how people [acted] at that time in Hollywood,” Ellin told Yahoo.
Ellin also blamed the backlash for the show’s lack of promotion on HBO: “For a while, we were hiding in, like, ‘architectural wish-fulfillment shows.’ Which is weird. We were nominated for the Emmys or the Golden Globes almost every single year, so to not put us in front and on the ‘must-see comedy’ list was pretty bizarre.”
As for “Entourage’s” future, any new reboot would be “written in a slightly kinder, gentler way because that’s the world we live in,” Ellin said. “But I’d love to catch up with these guys and see how Ari [Gold, the character played by Jeremy Piven] navigates the world. To be honest, I’d love to see how the real Ari Emanuel goes into the office every day now, because I know about his fire and passion. Ari was a guy who would walk into the office and leave his mark, and I don’t know how he does that today.”
Ellin added: “I’m proud of everything we did on ‘Entourage,’ and I certainly don’t think it’s something that should be a lightning rod. It should be looked at for what it was, which was a group of friends who really loved each other and cared about each other — money and all of that other stuff meant nothing to them.”
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