There’s reality television and then there’s the sort of small screen verité that’s captured — loosely scooped up, really — in Unscripted, George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Grant Heslov’s short-lived HBO
series. Given the show’s ruthlessly indifferent portrayal of Los
Angeles’ aspirant creative community as a den of backstabbing cajolers
in which only fitful personal progress is achieved (two steps sideways
and a half step back for every one forward), it’s not surprising that
this quote-unquote comedy was euthanized before it could ever really
find an audience.
If Entourage is the satirical hipster version of the City of Angels, the off-the-cuff Unscripted is a jazz-improv exercise, a tone poem that almost by its very nature sometimes connects and sometimes doesn’t. For the full DVD review, from IGN (and from last November), click here.