HBO Sitcom About EDM DJs Said to Be a Mix of ‘Entourage’ and ‘Project X’

Get those rave sticks and glow necklaces ready for lazy Sunday night couch sitting, Bros. Back in January, news broke about HBO developing a half hour sitcom series that is “set in the world of electronic music.” The show has some serious names attached to it as executive producers, including Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and Jay-Z. EDM blog Inthemix caught up with famed author Irvine Welsh, who’s co-writing the show. He claims it’s going to mix elements of Entourage and Project X, which is obviously pretty exciting for the bro population.

Via Inthemix:

“We’ve been working on stuff and trying to get something together,” Welsh confirmed to inthemix recently. “It’s a comedy about the rise of a DJ through the world of electronic dance music, from humble origins to becoming a superstar DJ… The idea’s to make it very character driven as well – you’ve got [touchstones] like Human Traffic and Project X and that kind of territory, and Entourage is another one too, you know, about the people that are around them.”

If you’re not familiar with Welsh’s work, start there. He’s the Scottish writer behind many a crazy drug-lit books, including Trainspotting, Glue, and a short story collection called Ecstacy. He’s dabbled in the electronic dance scene since the ’90s. There are hopes, however, that Calvin Harris will be scoring the show.

But Welsh won’t be in charge of the music for Higher, when it does eventually move into production: that job will go to the UK’s second wealthiest musician Calvin Harris, who came from humble beginnings in Dumfries, Scotland, two hours south of Welsh’s native Edinburgh.

“Hopefully he’ll do the music for it,” Welsh told inthemix. “Obviously he’s got a wealth of experience in that kind of world, so he’s not just a music supervisor, he’s a script consultant as well.”

To be honest, I’m not sure if a show about a music scene can nail the group-of-friends dynamic like Entourage did. What made the show great was not Vinny and the gang running around Hollywood in reckless abandon, but their relationships with each other. There are elements of that in Project X, but that movie just fetishized teenage partying like I’m Shmacked videos do. It seems like it will only be like Project X in that it will be a molly-induced portrayal of the EDM world.

Is this going to be any good? Will it actually be funny to a broad audience that doesn’t take the EDM scene very seriously? Or is it going to be weird drug humor that only people deep in the EDM scene will only understand? Time will tell.

But I’m skeptical.

[H/T: Nick]

Brandon Wenerd is BroBible's publisher, writing on this site since 2009. He writes about sports, music, men's fashion, outdoor gear, traveling, skiing, and epic adventures. Based in Los Angeles, he also enjoys interviewing athletes and entertainers. Proud Penn State alum, former New Yorker. Email: brandon@brobible.com