Entourage was always designed as escapist entertainment, but it has aged poorly – and it continues to look worse as the #MeToo movement unfolds. The show stars Adrian Grenier as Vincent Chase, a fictional movie star from Queens who brings his childhood friends along with him to Los Angeles. Much of the show involves his exploits in Hollywood, both professional and personal, alongside his buddies and his agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven).

The show, which aired from 2004 to 2011, had its fair share of detractors even before #MeToo. The show’s treatment of women was always questionable, as most female characters were disposable romantic pursuits that had no significance other than being attractive. Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) and Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) at times seemed to only exist to make disparaging comments about the women they encountered. Ari’s wife didn’t even have a name until the third-to-last episode of the series.

But when several high-profile Hollywood figures were outed for sexual harassment and assault, hindsight allowed for a much darker view of the show. Not only did several of these people exist on Entourage in some form, but they were viewed as comic figures. Most notably, the show featured a character named Harvey Weingard, an extremely thinly-veiled caricature of Harvey Weinstein. Weingard appeared in Seasons 2 and 4, and at both points Vincent and Ari reneged on deals with him — to his extreme chagrin. Weingard was portrayed as the brash, hot-headed lunatic that Weinstein was in real life, and offered such quotes as, “See that little c–t? That prick stole my head of production. He’s lucky I don’t go over there and crack this f–king bottle over his head.”

Entourage never touched on Weinstein’s alleged sexual assault, and the TV version only directed his rage towards male characters. But his tendency to go from zero to sixty on the anger front was used exclusively as comedy. This seems very weird, looking back from 2020, especially if Weinstein’s sexual deviancy was as much of an “open secret” in Hollywood as some have suggested. James Cameron, playing himself on the show, witnesses one of Weingard’s tantrums, and laughs it off, saying, “f–king Harvey.” Entourage was always an insider look at how the industry operated, and it’s almost as if this moment was a glimpse into the flippant manner in which people viewed his bad behavior.

Other figures accused in the #MeToo movement appeared on the show as themselves. In one episode, Johnny Drama gets a part on Rush Hour 3, directed by Brett Ratner. On the show, Ratner – who has been accused by several women of sexual harassment and assault – tells a model she “has the best ass in the world” on a photo shoot, then berates his assistant for feeding models Krispy Kreme donuts: “They’re supermodels, not teamsters.” When Drama arrives, Ratner’s assistant orders one a woman to give him a massage. Similarly, Jeffrey Tambor makes a number of cameos, also to comic effect: he constantly annoys Ari Gold, who is his agent in the show. Tambor was accused of sexual harassment by his former assistant, and on the show appears to jokingly allude to a similar scandal seven years before the allegations surfaced. “There was that little incident on Arrested Development,” he says. “You haven’t heard about it, there’s no reason to hear about it.”

Then, Ari Gold gets accused of sexual harassment in Season 7. He is certainly guilty: at one point, he asks a female agent if she signed a client “with a pen or his c–k.” Ari is a scoundrel throughout the whole show, but when his reckoning comes and his life is torn apart, the show tries to portray this character arc as sympathetic. Which might have worked at the time, but it’s much harder to root for him on a rewatch – especially because Piven has been accused of sexual assault himself.

Some can argue that much of Entourage’s male-centric humor is harmless, and it certainly isn’t the only show of its era to objectify women and make jokes at their expense. But certain parts of the show play out like a shrine to the #MeToo movement and the figures who were involved in it. At the very least, it was a comedic look into how Hollywood was during a very problematic era – which is just not funny anymore.

Next: Marvel Actors Accused of Sexual Harassment