In three and a half seasons of Entourage, Hollywood’s reigning alpha slacker has yet to live up to his name. “Vincent” is Latin for “conqueror”; “Chase” is English for “chase”; and yet at the first whiff of a sell-out or compromise, Hollywood’s most principled callow hedonist goes into retreat mode. If he can’t have the mansions, the groupies and all the other goodies packed into the gift baskets of superstardom on his own terms, then he’s headed back to Queens and its less gilded diversions.
But is fame really so easy to shrug off? Entourage may be, as the New York Times dubbed it, “chillingly realistic,” but it isn’t real. Hey Paula, a new Bravo series, is, or at least it purports to be, and it tells a much different story.
In the early years of this decade, America had erased its memories of dancer-turned-singing-dancer Paula Abdul so thoroughly that you may be startled to learn she sold more than 40 million albums in her heyday. Then, American Idol arrived in 2002 and once again her name became synonymous with the massive power of bad taste.
Now, in a mildly surprising move, she’s adding Hey Paula—an “unfiltered, real-life look” at her “crazy cool” world, according to the Bravo press releases—to her list of accomplishments. Typically, such territory is reserved for hangers-on in much less buoyant phases of their careers. Perhaps anticipating the bull market for semi-scripted celebrity verité can’t last forever, she’s decided to do the show that would inevitably be hers in, say, 2013, now.
After just a handful of episodes, Hey Paula has emerged as Entourage’s dark inverse. Celebrity is hell, and Abdul, previously thought to have the cushiest gig in TV’s vast, criminally underworked judiciary, is slave labor in the sweatshop of fame. Breakfast is a Red Bull at 4 a.m. on the way to a QVC appearance. Dinner is a bag of M&Ms on the way to a disaster relief benefit for Katrina’s four-legged survivors. Abdul exists in a limbo of limo rides and hotel corridors, starving and sleep-deprived, overworked and underappreciated, with no one to love but her four Chihuahuas. On Entourage, Vince’s flunkies were his pals long before they became line items on his Schedule C form. On Hey Paula, one of Abdul’s minions is identified as “stylist and best friend”—and, really, is there any phrase in the English language more fraught with heart-crushing sadness than “stylist and best friend”?
Which is not to say that she’s presented as a sympathetic character. If Abdul’s triage duties on Idol turned her into America’s sweetheart, her latest project seems weirdly determined to establish her as America’s creep. Paranoid, vindictive, forever on the verge of a blubbering meltdown, she lashes out at her flunkies with her Cowell hand so viciously you wonder why they don’t belt out pitchy renditions of “I Believe I Can Fly” as they go about their business—at least then they might earn a sympathetic word from the woman who’s never met an off-key lunatic whose spirit she didn’t find beautiful.
Clearly, fame is not making her happy. She’s sick of being treated like “a piece of dog shit.” She’s sick of feeling like she’s “in the middle of a crap sandwich.” And yet still she persists, hawking fake jewelry to glamour-starved housewives, ranting about missed opportunities with the Chicken Soup for the Soul people, doing whatever it takes, it seems, to make her name a little more ubiquitous, a little more permanent. While Abdul’s tendency to communicate in slurry sentence-like things only stoned dolphins can understand has left many wondering if she’s washing down those crap sandwiches with something substantially more soothing than Coca-Cola, there’s one thing Hey Paula makes painfully clear. Its star has a voracious, debilitating addiction, all right—to fame.
Indeed, if life in the limelight is such an excrement-smeared ordeal, why not abandon it? She wouldn’t even have to return to Queens, or wherever it is she came from—surely by now she has enough cash piled away to spend the rest of her days sitting by a pool in the Hollywood Hills, happy and rested and feeding dog treats to her flock of tiny canines and her stylist and best friend. Only this is not an option, because she’s hooked on fame.
She can’t give it up. She already knows what it’s like to be a forgotten footnote in the appendix of disposable dance-pop, and that, apparently, was even worse than her current nightmare. Fame may be a crap sandwich, but it’s served on a gorgeous plate. In a beautiful restaurant, with a great view and excellent valet service. And Vincent Chase is a fraud.