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Does E's new TV series have Tom Cruise in its crosshairs?

Michael Idato

Television shows used to jump the shark, but will The Arrangement be the first show to jump the couch?

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Trailer: The Arrangement

TV actress Megan Morrison is offered a $10 million marriage contract with Hollywood's biggest star.

Meet Kyle West. He's Hollywood's hottest actor, a disciple in the Institute of the Higher Mind and soon to marry a hitherto unknown actress signed to a decade-long marriage contract.

He's also fictional.

But the Hollywood establishment is doing a double take at the characters in the new series The Arrangement and wondering if they're not looking at a sly in-joke aimed squarely at Tom Cruise, Scientology and Katie Holmes.

The series was unveiled to US media today at a programming showcase in Los Angeles and despite persistent denials the panel was immediately barraged with Cruise and Holmes-related questions.

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"The character of Kyle West is not at all inspired by anyone in particular," is the denial the E channel issued late last year when the first trailer surfaced online and a lot of eyebrows were arched.

Today, the show's executive producer Jonathan Abrahams, was forced to repeat that denial.

Asked whether he was even able - legally - to say the series was based on Cruise and Holmes, Abrahams answered: "Even if I could legally do it, I don't have the authority to do it."

But he added: "It doesn't matter, because it really isn't."

Abrahams also conceded Hollywood's history was peppered with such stories.

"One of our writers on the show has been in the industry since the early 1970s and when you sit around in a room with people for eight hours a day the amount of true life stories, rumours and urban legends that get tossed around ... we couldn't fit it all into a season," he said.

"I have heard of contract marriages going back to the days of the early talkies," he added. "There is a lot of fodder to inspire this kind of thing."

The Arrangement is the story of a young actress Megan Morrison (Christine Evangelista) who auditions for a film but is instead offered a marriage contract to Tinseltown's biggest star Kyle West (Josh Henderson).

West is the poster boy of an organisation named the Institute of the Higher Mind, and West's "mentor" in the series is the institute's chief Terrence Anderson, played by Michael Vartan, who also seems to control much of his life.

The friendship between West and Anderson is obviously intended to mimic the close friendship of Tom Cruise and Scientology chief David Miscavige.

"This contract is about my reputation," Kyle tells Megan, in the trailer which was screened to US media. "The people that are relying on me to be the actor that everybody has to have in their movie. If Kyle West gets humiliated, that is bad for business."

In another scene, Terence says: "Kyle's choices reflect on us. I don't want to clean up another trainwreck."

When it was first unveiled last year the US entertainment industry trade publication Deadline said it had drawn "a lot of attention at the pilot stage due to some similarities between its plot and Tom Cruise, his ties to Scientology and his relationship with Katie Holmes."

Deflecting questions about Scientology, Abrahams told US media today the series hoped to explore the place "self help organisations" have in Hollywood.

"These self-help organisations are about aspiring," he said. "There's a real promise to it: join our thing, do our program, spend X amount of dollars for the weekend intensive and you can change your life.

"To me that's not about faith, it's about hope," Abrahams added.

The show's star Josh Henderson, who was most recently seen in the TNT channel's revival of Dallas, said Hollywood life was full of rumours like those explored in The Arrangement.

"Everyone has heard rumours and myths about these kind of things," Henderson said. "That's what's kind of fun living in this world. We get to tell our own story."

Abrahams added the series was not working "towards a couch jumping moment."

Instead, he said, "it is really about how do you normalise this sort of ludicrous arrangement.

"The idea seems so crazy, but it happens, so how to free thinking, intelligent people make decisions like this and what are the ramifications, what are their lives like after they make these decisions," Abrahams said.

Though many of the questions fired at the panel were intended to be light-hearted, Abrahams acknowledged that they contained a more serous line of questioning.

"It was a joke but there is a question beneath the joke," Abrahams said.

"I am going to plead the fifth," he added, referring to the US constitution's fifth amendment, which guarantees no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."

The 10-part drama series launches on E in March.