by Guy Branum
So Entourage is a tight network of men whose mutual support leads to the seamless ascent of all. By the time of the Entourage movie, Ari is the head of a studio; Vinnie stars in and directs a hit film; Turtle has his own tequila line; E. has 10 percent of whatever Vinnie makes, as well as a beautiful wife and daughter; and Johnny Drama wins a Golden Globe. One suspects if this linear ascent were allowed to persist for a few more movies, Ari Gold would be a six-term president of the United States, and Vinnie Chase would be The Young Pope.
A key question in any comedy is “What is being ignored?” Comedy is a narrative form that attempts to see the world positively; to some extent, it must always be obscuring some aspect of the full human experience in order to maintain that positivity. Mel Brooks said, “Tragedy is when I cut my thumb; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” When it’s your thumb, you feel even the smallest of injuries, but when it’s some other guy, you have the distance to see the charm in even egregious injury. Brooks doesn’t make this poor schmuck break his leg. He kills him. Comedy is the joy of not having to feel all the pain.
What Entourage is ignoring is that no one’s life is as good as Vinnie Chase’s. No one always wins. Adrian Grenier, who is exactly as hot as Vinnie Chase, who is a movie star and a millionaire, who won at Hollywood—even he has not been in a movie you’d want to see since The Devil Wears Prada in 2005. Real people, even the most beautiful and successful, have failures. Vinnie Chase does not. Vinnie Chase—and thereby his boys—is playing through life with the cheat codes on. He cannot be defeated. He gets everything. That’s not a real thing. It’s as fantastical as Hobbits.
It may be easy to interpret my reading of Entourage as simple derision. Shitting on Entourage is easy, but it’s not my goal. While Entourage’s storytelling is grossly unrealistic, I’d argue it is the story that powers Los Angeles. In Entourage, the show’s creator, Doug Ellin, was able to essentialize the Hollywood Dream: eternal youth, beauty, and winning. Authors from Nathanael West to Billy Wilder to Randy Newman have tried to encapsulate precisely what makes L.A. tick, but most became enamored of the seedy underside of the story. They wanted to show you the rot created by the myth. Entourage is a magical land where that rot never touches our blessed boys. Vinnie may have occasional specters of failure, but they are always erased. Los Angeles is the hope that every day can be sunny, and Entourage lets you believe that so long as you are an attractive, heterosexual, not-too-short or too-fat or too-old white male, those sunny days can be yours.
The Comeback is set in this same land of plenty but makes very different choices about what it shows and obscures. I would say if The Comeback is about anything, it’s about genre. In 2005, right at the time multicam sitcoms were losing prominence to single-cam sitcoms and reality TV, The Comeback analyzed how each of these genres created comedy through what they show and obscure. The questions at the core of the show are “What kind of laugh are you looking for?” and “Who’s laughing?”
The Comeback tells the story of Valerie Cherish, an L.A. comic actress who had a successful five-season run on a multicam sitcom in the early 1990s. Her success was moderate, though. Her original series, I’m It, ended just short of the hundred episodes required for sitcom syndication and eternal money and glory. Valerie gets a chance at a comeback, however: She is cast in a multicam pilot, but she must agree to do a reality show about her comeback at the same time. Thus, we are presented with three rival renderings of comedy in three different genres.
The multicam sitcom-within-a-show on The Comeback is Room and Bored, a sexy romp of the sort churned out in the late 1990s that aims to emulate Lisa Kudrow’s original star vehicle, Friends. Room and Bored is set on the beach, presumably in Southern California, and features the low-stakes, simple-resolution conflict of a show like Three’s Company. The jokes are hack. The writers all came from Harvard or Yale, but to sell out, they’re cranking out pabulum we’ve all seen before. The director is the legendary James Burrows, but he’s coasting by as the genre he helped create dies. The fact that Valerie Cherish takes her job slinging these jokes seriously in fact reduces her value in the estimation of the writer/producers. Room and Bored and, by extension, multicam comedy, is a bad, moribund genre of show made by exquisitely sharp and capable professionals servicing a backward-looking industry.
Yet the single-camera sitcom that we’re watching, The Comeback, is an attempt to more closely echo the reality of what life is like for an aging actress in Hollywood. There’s no laugh track; the characters are more rounded; our heroine faces actual emotional danger; and not everything works out great. We understand that Valerie Cherish’s life has some similarities to Lisa Kudrow’s, but that she has been sculpted into a heightened comic character. Single-cam comedy attempts to resuscitate TV comedy by asking us to see more of our character’s reality and use pain to make joy more well-earned.
The reality show being shot about Valerie, confusingly also titled The Comeback, provides us with all the raw footage from behind the scenes of filming Room and Bored, but it is not seen by anyone in the show until the last episode of the first season. That is, this version exists according to the new rules being created for how we watch reality comedy shows. If Room and Bored is echoing Friends, then the reality-show-within-a-show The Comeback is being watched in the way we watched The Osbornes or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Through coercive editing of “real” events, it creates sharp, clear, simple reactions from viewers. The genre distances us enough to laugh at the tragedies befalling real people. It asks us to accept that no injury suffered by anyone on-camera can be that bad, because they’re all famous people on TV.
The three competing approaches to comedy are placed in direct contrast in the last two episodes of The Comeback’s first season. After pressure from the network, the producers of Room and Bored finally give Valerie Cherish a big slapstick moment on the show. The multicam slapstick moment, a pratfall in a giant cupcake costume, is presented as hack and silly. No sophisticated viewer in 2005 is laughing at this.
But on the single-cam sitcom, we see the context: Valerie striving to perfect the pratfall despite her scoliosis; the callous producer, Paulie G, ignoring her hard work; Valerie reaching a boiling point and hitting the producer in the stomach; Paulie G vomiting; Valerie vomiting. Here the motivating factors are less contrived, the slapstick moment realer and grosser. It elicits from the viewer a sharper, realer laugh, but the humor is mixed with sadness and disgust. A sophisticated 2005 viewer would definitely react to this moment, but not entirely positively.
On the final episode of the first season of The Comeback, we see the moment when Valerie hits Paulie G and the subsequent vomiting—but through the lens of the reality show. The moment is stripped of context. To Valerie, it’s shameful and embarrassing, but to the viewing public, it’s just funny. Conclusion: Reality TV objectifies its participants into a different kind of light comedy.
If Entourage presents Los Angeles as a place of infinite power and glory for the taking, The Comeback explores it as a place where narrative is always controlling how much of that power and glory you have. Entourage shows us happy people in Los Angeles, but The Comeback shows us people in Los Angeles trying to tell the story of their own happiness by excluding the things that Entourage refuses to contemplate. Valerie wants to think about her TV show but not the water damage in her house. Paulie G wants to think of himself as a powerful Emmy-winning showrunner who gets blown by hot chicks, not a fat guy who had a childhood crush on Valerie. Valerie Cherish wants what Vinnie Chase has; it is perhaps her tragic flaw. She doesn’t realize that Vinnie Chase’s happiness is a thing that can exist only in fiction.
Andy Warhol said, “I love L.A. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” Vinnie Chase is plastic. Valerie Cherish wants to be plastic. No human being can actually be plastic. Valerie Cherish is a fictitious character, but refusing to let Valerie be plastic imbues her with some of the magic of reality.
On The Comeback, Malin Akerman’s character, Juna, is used to represent this misguided Hollywood dream. Juna is young, beautiful, and buzzy, just like Valerie used to be. Valerie covets all that Juna has, but every time we get a peek into Juna’s perspective, we see someone with problems and indignities not so different from Valerie’s. Valerie cannot imagine that Juna’s it-girl status might fade like her own because she sees Juna as a flawless image of success—not a real, flawed, embattled person like Valerie has always known herself to be. Valerie never sees the water damage in Juna’s house, so Valerie imagines her life is unsullied by such banalities. The Comeback’s central argument is that those banalities are important and beautiful, too.
We now laud The Comeback as a work of genius and tend to deride Entourage for its douchiness, but in 2005, that wasn’t conventional wisdom. In the New York Times review of The Comeback, Alessandra Stanley contrasts the two: “ ‘The Comeback’ is interesting, but ‘Entourage’ is a more charming comedy: the missteps of actors on the way up are less painful to watch than the graceless freefall of actresses on the way down.” Stanley sees it as a comedy’s duty to protect her from the dangers of reality, but The Comeback argues that belief in the possibility of life without setbacks and complexity is the real danger.
The second season of The Comeback ends with a choice for Valerie: the image of clear, unalloyed happiness as she accepts an Emmy Award, or the complex, painful reality of going to the hospital room of her beloved hairdresser who’s battling cancer. She chooses the latter, and for the first time in the series, she is represented not as someone on-camera but simply as a human being. She wins the Emmy, sure, but she accepts that the life she has off-camera matters more.
Entourage says L.A. is a comedy because everyone (we care about) is always succeeding. The Comeback says L.A. is a comedy because everyone is always failing, but in the end, they’re all going to be fine.
This is why I love L.A. My friend Ryan5 once said, “Actors who go to New York want to act, and actors who come to L.A. want to be sexier versions of themselves.” There’s something so fun about being in a place where everyone’s hungering for a thing they can’t achieve and are always dissatisfied despite the fact that their lives are great, they’re being paid to do fun things, and the sun is, at least 340 days out of the year, shining. But everyone in L.A. is a little bit sad because they’re not as happy as Matt Bomer’s head shot looks.
L.A. is particularly wonderful for a fat person. People are often confused by why I, a super-fat, not particularly physically attractive person, would want to live in West Hollywood, the ketamine-stoked crucible of shallow gay self-consciousness and derision. Let me answer that with a story.
My friend Matt Wilkas is insanely, ridiculously handsome. He has a square jaw, perfect abs, and luminous eyes. He and his Olympic-skier boyfriend6 are regularly on lists of the hottest gay male couples. Matt sustained injuries during the course of playing Spider-Man on Broadway. He is a certifiable member of the gay-hot-person elite. When Matt moved from New York to West Hollywood, he complained about how inadequate he felt walking down the street in a tank top.
That is why I love L.A. I’m fat, I’m failing at L.A., but so is Matt Wilkas. So are Lisa Kudrow and Adrian Grenier and Matt Bomer. And in the end, we’re all doing a lot better than anyone in Sacramento.
How much do I love Los Angeles? In 2014, we got a second chance to give The Comeback, Lisa Kudrow’s greatest, purest performance, an Emmy. Nine years after our initial failure, we’d surely seen the error of our ways, given the series its very own comeback, and surrounded it with critical glory.
But we didn’t.
We gave the Emmy to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, just one of the eleven Emmys she’d received by then. Just one of the six she’d receive for the same role. The TV Academy not giving Lisa Kudrow an Emmy for The Comeback in 2014 is a grand lady in a ball gown slipping on a banana peel, picking herself up with as much dignity as she can recover, then slipping on the banana peel again. That’s why I love L.A.
* * *
1. Why am I trying to milk this for dramatic tension when I just spent the last chapter detailing all the sweet writing gigs I’ve had?
2. My friends Kevin and Ryan! (This is a different gay Ryan.)
3. My friend Sam!
4. It’s hard to believe La La Land didn’t win.
5. This is the same gay Ryan.
6. You know which one.
EPILOGUE
DURGA AND THE SLAYING OF Mahishasura
EARLY IN THIS BOOK, I told you it was a survival guide.
It was a broad rhetorical gesture, intended to make you feel like you were going into something with powerful, life-and-death stakes. If I had really wanted to follow through on this premise, I probably should have ended each chapter with some suggested activities, possibly created some badges that could be earned for showing proficiency in various survival skills. I honestly thought there’d be more recipes for game meat and acorns in it. I should have at least told you guys how to build a lean-to.
This book isn’t that kind of survival guide. This book is a guide to my own survival. I’m not telling you how to live your life, just detailing how I managed to make it through mine. It isn’t a perfect or even an admirable life, but I thought you should have the chance to take a look at it and make your own judgments.
Once an interviewer asked Ruth Bader Ginsburg about her first legal job. Ginsburg was hired by a liberal New York law firm as a summer associate, but was not given an offer for a permanent position after graduation. The firm had hired a black woman as a lawyer, and didn’t feel they needed to make any more gestures to prove their broad-mindedness. The interviewer asked if she was still angry about this dismissal of her skills. “Suppose they did offer me a job,” Ginsburg responded. “Probably I would have climbed up the ladder and today I would be a retired partner.” Instead she’s a Supreme Court justice and one of the most successful oral advocates in American legal history. “So often in life,” she continued, “things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be a great good fortune.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg certainly isn’t saying oppression or discrimination are good things. They are not trials that ennoble us. What she’s saying is life doesn’t always follow the path you expected or hoped for, but everything you do, every skinned knee, every meltdown at a crush, every Secret Service raid on your house: They make you who you are, they give you strength and perspective.
And maybe along the way, you’ll remember that you’re a goddess.
Let me tell you the story of Durga.
There was this buffalo demon, Mahishasura, who was waging war against the Hindu gods. Well, he wasn’t exactly a “demon”—that’s a very Christian concept. He was this thing called an Asura, one of a group of powerful entities who were always waging war on the Devas, or, as we know them, gods. Mahishasura was a powerful warrior with the ability to shift shape, and he’d made Brahma, the god of creation, bless him so that no man could ever defeat him. Anytime the Devas would attack Mahishasura, he would just shift shape and defeat them. Vishnu tried turning into his incarnation as a man-lion, then as a boar, but Mahishasura always had a new and more powerful form. Shiva tried shooting a beam of destruction from his third eye, but nothing worked. Soon Mahishasura ruled over all of the world. Things weren’t looking great for the Devas.
And the thing you need to know about Mahishasura is that he was pretty certain that all his powers and all of his invincibility meant he was king shit.
So all of the Hindu gods got together and realized the only way to defeat this powerful guy with the huge ego was to be a little selfless. They each took a piece of their female essence, called Shakti, and combined them. The combined energies became a blinding light, and then out of the light came an exquisitely beautiful woman with a thousand hands. This was Durga. The gods came forward, and each offered her their weapon. Shiva offered his trident, Vishnu his discus, Agni his spear, Vayu his bow and ar
rows. When all of her hands were filled with all the gods’ weapons, Durga mounted a lion and rode to do battle with Mahishasura. When he heard about it, he laughed arrogantly. “She shall be my queen!” he said, and sent his generals to capture her. She cut both their heads off in a single stroke. He sent a thousand Asuras to bring down this proud woman, but she killed them all and drank their blood. One by one, Durga destroyed Mahishasura’s henchmen until only he remained. This was to be Hinduism’s greatest boss battle.
Mahishasura knew that no man could slay him, and he was pretty sure no woman was strong enough to do it. It was very Witch King of Angmar. He turned into a buffalo and charged at Durga. She threw a lasso around his neck and started strangling him, but Mahishasura transformed into an elephant and started uprooting rocks with his tusks and throwing at them at her. She shot the rocks out of the sky with her arrows. Then Mahishasura turned into a serpent, and Durga attacked with her sword. Finally, Mahishasura returned to his buffalo state and Durga lunged at him with her trident, the weapon of Shiva, the destroyer. Her attack was true—the trident plunged into Mahishasura’s flank and unholy blood and bile gushed out. Durga, however, was untouched and resplendent. She returned with her trophies of victory to the adulations of the other gods, but she wasn’t stuck up about it. Durga is the destruction of ego.
I hope she had a daiquiri in each and every one of those hands after saving the world from chaos and destruction. Even a goddess needs some “me” time.
Durga’s name is frequently translated as “invincible” or “beyond reach.” It comes from the roots dur (difficult) and gam (go through), and while I know absolutely nothing about ancient Sanskrit, it seems possible her name might not refer to how hard it is to go through her, but how hard the things she’s gone through have been. Maybe both. Maybe those things are the same.
