HBO's 'Unscripted': A Promising Page From the Actor's Life

Struggling actors Bryan Greenberg and Jennifer Hall play -- you guessed it -- struggling actors in the new HBO docudrama "Unscripted." (Photos Richard J. Cartwright)

If there's anything television doesn't need -- or so you'd think -- it's another show about show business. From all those pop star biographies on VH1 and A&E and just plain E! to hype-happy "news" shows like "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood," television has got television covered.

Then there are the fictional shows with showbiz settings -- such series as, on HBO alone, "Curb Your Enthusiasm," starring comic genius Larry David as himself, and "Entourage," about a young superstar and his coterie of cronies. Indeed HBO, which aired the brilliant "Larry Sanders Show," is probably the last network that should add a showbiz show, and yet tomorrow night at 10 it unveils "Unscripted," a comic docudrama based on the struggles of three young actors in Hollywood. The premiere consists of two half-hour episodes back-to-back.

Sound like wretched excess? It may be excess, but it's not wretched. There's room for one more show in any category if it's a good show, and from the outset "Unscripted" is at least unbad, and it definitely grows on you the way good but quirky shows do. By the end of the first half-hour, I was utterly embedded.

The producers, who include George Clooney -- once a struggling young actor himself -- and the famous disappointment Steven Soderbergh, may overestimate how fascinated Americans are with showbiz, but the series is about more than that. It's about striving to succeed at anything, really, including at being a reasonably respectable human being who hasn't performed euthanasia on his own conscience.

Young actors looking for work in Hollywood inevitably have other young actors as friends, but such relationships are sticky and tricky because the business is so competitive. If two friends audition for the same part, only one can get it; then the other has to feign delight at his pal's good fortune. But how delighted can anybody be at losing, whether to friend or enemy?

Another question: How scripted is "Unscripted"? HBO says all the dialogue is unscripted, but that seems hard to believe since some of the lines include exposition necessary to tell the story. Perhaps it's shot like David's innovative "Enthusiasm": Scenes and what they should contain are discussed by the actors and director (Clooney directed the first five episodes), then most of the dialogue is developed through improvisation. Anyway, there is no point in arguing whether it's "reality" or not, because TV has muddled the definition of reality into mud. The series does feel extremely realistic, which is close enough.

"Unscripted" succeeds credibly and entertainingly in deglamorizing an occupation that most of us still probably think of as exciting and glittery even at its most rudimentary level. But anybody watching the show who is absolutely determined to try the acting trade is unlikely to be dissuaded. The unpredictability of the actors' lives may be maddening to live through on a day-by-day level, yet it appears hugely attractive when compared with the routine rigors of a 9-to-5 office job or daily duty on an assembly line.

Krista Allen is hugely attractive, too, and enormously engaging as the most telegenic of the three young actors, all using their real names even though the characters may not be just like themselves. Allen plays a youthful single mom who is trying to find not only acting jobs but respectability, since most of her experience, before having a baby, was sexploitation stuff.

She's faced with a challenge to her ego control when she shows up for one audition with son Jake, now 6, in tow and later learns that though she didn't get the part, the producers are very interested in Jake for another role in the same show.

Allen also knows that if rejection is hard to take for an adult, a child competing for acting jobs stands a very good chance of developing a vast array of neuroses and complexes. Allen has a great scene in the fourth show, loudly berating a casting director for insulting Jake during an audition. It's a forceful harangue. Unfortunately, she's in the wrong office delivering it to the wrong casting director.

The other two likable young actors are Jennifer Hall, down-to-earth and adorable; and Bryan Greenberg, handsome and eager but with a tendency to fall flat on his carefully fussed-over face. To lend more authenticity, real Hollywood personalities appear in cameos, among them Noah Wyle on the set of "ER," George Lopez of "The George Lopez Show," Hank Azaria of Showtime's "Huff," playing poker -- suddenly the most fashionable indoor activity in the country, other than sex -- and, very briefly in the fourth episode, Brad Pitt, whose dialogue consists of "You're in my chair."

Allen, Hall and Greenberg are not best friends but have in common enrollment in an acting class conducted by Goddard Fulton, played by Frank Langella. Fulton dispenses such trite advice as "You'll never be a great actor if you can't make a fool of yourself," "To be an actor you have to be dangerous in some way" and, coaching and scolding students as they go through a scene, "Be actors! Come on, be actors! Don't just be people!"

Earlier he warns the class that the system will "just use you up and spit you out" unless they can come up with "something that's timeless and universal."

"Unscripted" may not turn out to be timeless or universal, but it does get your attention quickly and hurl you pell-mell into the lives of the three young would-bes. Many of the scenes, especially the exteriors, were shot with a strange golden hue, which may be a way of saying that this is a golden, gilded time for the young actors -- even though they may not realize it for years to come.

Unscripted (30 minutes) airs tomorrow night at 10 on HBO. A second episode follows.