By Greg Beato
Taking Care of Business
Not even Lindsay Lohan in the midst of a bathroom stall blizzard is higher than the Dow these days. Housing starts, manufacturing shipments and all the other key economic indicators are up too, and yet according to the most telling metric of the nation's fiscal health, we're still not as gainfully mired in the rat race as we'd like: All of our finest sitcoms -- “The Office,” “30 Rock,” “Entourage” -- are about work.
In the '90s, the opposite was true. Then, the sitcoms titillated us with visions of pornographic leisure. The “Friends” gang, for example, was essentially a group of hygienic hippies. They always had plenty of time to hang out in coffee shops and sleep with each other, and yet somehow they could also afford to live in upscale apartments that would have taken real Manhattanites 80-hour workweeks to maintain.
“Seinfeld” served up an even more hardcore version of time porn. Its thirty-something (and eventually forty-something) protagonists lived like college freshmen, unencumbered by families, mortgages, or adult responsibilities of any kind. Sure, they had jobs, sort of, but their jobs were the least important, most peripheral part of their lives.
In contrast, the cubicle is where the heart is on “The Office” and “30 Rock.” Work is the place where Michael Scott and Liz Lemon find girlfriends, boyfriends, meaning for their lives. But even these shows tacitly acknowledge that there may be something more to life than one's job -- when the characters hit the elevators each night, they're going somewhere, right?
“Entourage,” however, makes no such concessions, and because of this, it is the ultimate fantasy for tenuously employed office drones worrying about the latest corporate restructuring tsunami. Indeed, while it may seem as if the workday never starts for pampered movie star Vincent Chase and his pals, in fact it never ends. Dinners are auditions. Parties are sponsorship opportunities. Even when Vince and company are lounging by the pool, there are scripts to read, phone calls to make, phone calls to dodge.
No aspect of Vince's life is without a work-related component. His best friend Eric is his manager. His other friend Turtle is his all-purpose flunky. His brother Johnny isn't technically on the payroll, but he gets free room and board at the Vince mansion in exchange for cooking duties.
Then, of course, there's Vince's one true love, his agent Ari. When the two men parted ways over a deal gone bad, the show's writers treated it like a romantic break-up. Vince moped, Ari pined. And while they tried to distract and console themselves with new agents, new clients, it was clear they only had eyes for each other.
Other sitcoms have already done platonic man-love. Remember Jerry's fling with former Mets star Keith Hernandez? Remember Joey's jealousy over Chandler's new roommate? But “Entourage” has elevated the conceit to something more than schtick. For Vince, sex and even romance are abundant and disposable: Women pass in and out of his life like temps. But a loyal, pushy, loud-mouthed advocate who will fight for him when his latest million-dollar project devolves into a mess of bruised egos and schedule conflicts? That's a much rarer commodity.
And so Vince reserves his deepest love for his agent, that special someone who offers so much more than orgasms or emotional support -- job security. Or at least the pushy, loud-mouthed promise of it. And we sit and watch with envy, fantasizing about Aris of our own. In the age of economic uncertainty, he's the new Rachel Green, the bitch we want to hug it out with for eternity.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]