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Has anyone else noticed that since the death of HBO’s Sex and the City, any premium cable channel original series that centers on women airs on Showtime?

Entourage, which kicked off its sixth season last night with “Drive,” seems to be a microcosm of this trend. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved Entourage since its premiere for its refusal to take itself too seriously as it satirizes an industry known mostly for taking itself too seriously. The characters are just outrageous enough to be believable, creating the kind of entertainment that makes you shake your head at the state of the world while secretly rooting against a remedy that would make this kind of comedy impossible. I always buy the seasons when they’re released on DVD, and once that first DVD goes in the player, I am dead to the world until I’ve finished the season.

It was actually season five before I started to marvel at how disposable women really are on this series. Maybe I didn’t notice because I was too busy marveling at how Entourage’s writers have done what most series have found impossible: taken a concept that originated in the naïveté of kids that hit it big and allowed them to grow without killing the comedy. I mean, come on, do you really think that Gossip Girl is going to survive graduation?

But this growth seems very resistent to women, who have always been little more than disposable arm candy for the boys. In the season five finale, writers made a lot of Vince (Adrian Grenier) reconnecting with his childhood sweetheart Kara (Mercedes Masöhn), but she now appears to have been a fixture as temporary as Vince’s period of slumming it in Queens.

On the contrary, what allows the show to progress is its return to an unapologetic celebration of dysfunctional fraternity where none of the boys: Vince, E (Kevin Connolly), Drama (Kevin Dillon), Turtle (Jerry Ferrara), and even the married-with-children super-agent Ari (Jeremy Piven) want to progress beyond Neverland. And women—-with the exception of the appropriately billed Mrs. Ari (Perrey Reeves) who gets to tag along in a Wendy-like fashion—-rock the fairy-tale boat of lost boys far too much.



I mean, come on. They still dress alike.

I don’t take the terminal relegation of promising women co-stars like Emily (Samaire Armstrong), Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui), Shauna (Debi Mazar) and even Ari’s partner Barbara Miller (Beverly D’Angelo) as misogyny on the part of the show’s creators-—they’ve proven that they’re far too smart for such transparent commentary. Instead, I see a much more subtle comment on the underbelly of Hollywood made by the story’s arc—-the only way it can continue is through a permanent miring in dysfunction that exposes Hollywood’s lingering sexism along the way.

So even though Weeds, the now cancelled L Word, and Nurse Jackie, the brand-new show from longtime HBO property Edie Falco of Sopranos fame all live at Showtime, I wouldn’t say that HBO quit talking about women Sarah Jessica Parker jumped ship.