When the reality series “Laguna Beach” started in 2004, MTV promised it would expose “The Real Orange County”; the dewy documentary was styled as a lifelike answer to Fox’s soapy “OC.”
To keep things consistent, then, MTV’s new reality series, “Twentyfourseven,” the story of a pack of guys aiming for fame in Hollywood, could have billed itself as the real “Entourage,” and a fan’s companion to that HBO comedy. Except now everyone knows how it goes: life begets art, which begets “reality.” Somewhere, in other words, young men actually do roll together, knock shoulders and pledge to make Thursday night “sick” and “insane.” That becomes comedy, which in turn becomes “Twentyfourseven,” which has its premiere tonight.
The producers have ably managed to recruit some presentable and ambitious young men from the honking, bottlenecked entrance to fame’s freeway. Among them are agent-filmmaker-actor-musician types. Their designated capo is Greg, who is, as it happens, a perfect narrator: a man whose disembodied baritone offers so many regional, racial and ethnic miscues that there’s some suspense before you finally see his face: he’s Arkansan (originally), 23 and white.
His real job is to be the star of “Twentyfourseven,” but MTV has given him cover in the ideal fame-seeker’s profession, the one that crosses courtier and profiteer and leaves almost no trace in, say, W-4 forms: party promoter. He also seems to sort of date Haylie Duff, sister of a bona fide famous person, Hilary Duff.
Greg’s brother Chris has a band, the Prom Kings, that sounds like most other Green Day-era bands, i.e., like Green Day, i.e., not that bad. The band seems far enough along in its evolution that MTV is not embarrassed to let it jam on the channel’s time.
At first the characters seem stiff, false and forced into a television friendship charade. But I came to like Chris when he insists on returning to “the dirty” — his name for Arkansas — shortly before playing at one of Greg’s parties. Though he says he’ll be back in Los Angeles in time to perform, he’s going to make only $500 at the gig (as opposed to Greg’s cut of the door), and some hunting boys back home have promised him a deer and a hog. Besides, he wants to see Mom and Dad.
Greg is enraged. This is his party that Chris is blowing off, and anyway, they were supposed to be all Hollywood now. But Chris, the older, digs in and leaves the city; he then misses his performance entirely when he lands in jail.
This return-of-the-Arkansas-repressed in the midst of the effort to go Hollywood is a good twist, and different from the way Queens occasionally comes back to haunt the consciences of the gang on “Entourage.” As with “Laguna Beach,” however, MTV seems to have deployed every camera at Viacom just following the cast members around town in case something exciting — a cellphone call! — happens.
It’s unlikely that the producers will wrangle a crew to stray beyond California and fly a whole team to Little Rock or Hot Springs. Too bad. It might be instructive to see what could go wrong in a healthy Arkansas childhood, filled with hogs, deer and good times, to turn a decent country boy into a mangy old party promoter.
