Does Entourage Roll Deep or Fall Flat?

It is the show that placed “hug it out” in America’s lexicon. It also gave Jeremy Piven a steady career and ensured that America didn’t remember him as Dean Pritchard from Old School. However, after viewing the first four episodes of season six, Entourage can be known also as the show that got too stale and overstayed its welcome.

Entourage has the ingredients of a successful show. For those who don’t know, Entourage tells the story of an actor from Queens, Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), and his struggles and successes in Hollywood. His buddies join him in Hollywood: his friend and manager Eric “E” Murphy (Kevin Connelly), his unsuccessful actor brother Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), and his other friend Turtle (Jerry Ferrara). The source of much of the comedy and story in Entourage comes from the fact that all four are friends and therefore bust each other’s chops like friends do. The comedy works in Entourage because the four characters are basic comedy archetypes: the successful one, the serious one, the loser, and the stoner. Everyone knows someone like one of the characters on the show which allows  many viewers to relate to the show’s situational plot developments. Thus, to the audience, the comedy and characters seem genuine, even if they can’t relate to the situations.

The other main character (the one with the most buzz: three Emmys!) is Vince’s agent, Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven). Ari is the sleaziest of sleazy agents, which leads to hilarity. He sabotages his rivals, feuds with E, slings one-liners, and has one of the funniest husband-wife relationships on television.  He’s played his role so well that even though he is a supporting actor, he is the one that has the best lines and generates the most favorable reviews for the show. (And as an aside, his performance as Ari has given him multiple movie roles in which he gets to shine on the silver screen. The Goods, which comes out on August 14th, basically changes Piven’s role to sleazy used car salesman from sleazy agent).

From the preceding two paragraphs, Entourage seems like a well-oiled machine. However, there are fundamental flaws that have reared their head in the previous seasons that have taken away from the luster of the show. The first is Adrian Grenier’s acting ability, or more appropriately his inability. Grenier can’t act worth a damn. It’s no stretch to make this statement, as the character has been played with maddening inconsistency over the show’s six seasons. If the classic cliché is that actors ask “What’s my motivation?”, then Grenier must have asked it multiple times, heard the same answer, and tried a different way of playing the character anyway. The functions that Vince character needs to fulfill consistently are acting well and partying hard. Yet, we’ve seen Vincent Chase the introspective partier and we’ve seen Vincent Chase the partier who looks for his next hook-up whilst bedding a different woman (and yes, I said whilst to add a veneer of propriety and manners to a fictional celebrity’s sex life).

Surprisingly, though, Grenier’s limited ability as an actor is actually insignificant to the success or failure of the show. Because the show more about the four friends and less about the business of Hollywood, it is not essential for Vince to be seen working as an actor. Entourage is a rare show because it can still be relatively successful in spite of the believability of the central character. For instance, imagine how popular Seinfeld would have been if Jerry Seinfeld wasn’t funny and the audience didn’t think that he could be a comedian. This gift, though, means that the Vince character can’t attempt serious acting or else the show becomes unbelievable.

Yet, the show decided to pursue this course of action in season five. To summarize briefly, Vince’s self-financed movie at the end of season four was a flop and made him a Hollywood outcast (much like Dennis Hopper after The Osterman Weekend). After some soul-searching (including a hilarious episode where the gang ingests psychedelic mushrooms), Vince agrees to play a supporting role in a drama about firemen. Conflict ensues, however, when the German director of the film can’t elicit the proper emotion from Vince in a crucial scene where he tells his wife that he loves her (because, of course, the supporting character in a disaster movie always dies). This leads to the movie being shut down because the German director was a psychopath and Vince being out of a job. Vince’s manager E passes the test shots to Gus Van Sant, who in turn passes them to Martin Scorsese, who then offers Vince a role in his modern interpretation of The Great Gatsby, thus saving Vince’s career (much like how Blue Velvet saved Dennis Hopper’s).

The problem, though, was that the test shots weren’t good in any sense of the word. When they were shown, I thought that the end was near for Vince’s acting career. I actually found myself agreeing with the director: Vince didn’t show any emotion as a firefighter. Thus, I found it hard to believe that the greatest director of our time wanted to cast him in Gatsby (A second, more comically cynical part of me wondered why Leo DiCaprio wasn’t available).

Usually because of this impediment, the show usually avoids giving Vince a serious role (I can count the number of truly serious scenes Grenier has performed on one hand). This avoidance leads to the second problem with Entourage: the storylines are repetitive. Here is the plot of every episode of Entourage: Vince wakes up in his house and is confronted with a problem, E and Ari confront over the best way to solve the problem, Ari delivers a hilarious one liner, Drama faces a conflict related to his struggling career, Turtle smokes weed while pretending to have a real job, the problem resolves itself and the gang looks over a city skyline from a balcony whilst toasting champagne. With such a repetitive plot, there is temptation to create comedy from outlandish situations rather than creating it from actual character-to-character interaction, and oftentimes it falls flat. (Really, how many different ways could we watch Johnny Drama try to snag bit parts or see E have conflicted feelings about a relationship?)

However, both of these problems are symptomatic of the larger illness that plagues Entourage: the show only works when the main characters are interacting with each other and for some bizarre reason, the writers of the show have seen it fit to limit the interaction between the characters. The best episodes of any television comedy, Entourage included, are ones where the main characters interact with each other. This rule is because none of the characters on a thirty-minute sitcom can be developed to a point where an exclusive storyline is merited. As I’ve stated earlier, each of the characters represents a specific comedic archetype. Because of this representation, the characters need to interact with each other or else the writers will rely on situations to create the comedy and those situations will run out (I would argue that they have run out but that’s not the point). Yet, in the most recent episode, “Running on E”, there are five different plotlines. They are as follows:

• Ari tries to stop his best friend and colleague from having an affair with a younger agent
• E has doubts about his management company and his new girlfriend isn’t helping manners
• Turtle shops for back to school clothes with his girlfriend, Jamie-Lynn Sigler
• Drama needs to screen test potential female guest stars for his show and asks Turtle for help when none of the potential guest stars satisfy him
• Vince is bored and gets laid

In a twenty-eight-minute show, there just isn’t enough time to fully develop all of those plotlines while still being funny. It’s the classic problem of oversaturation: if you try to do too much, then nothing can be done in a fully satisfying way.

Yet, all of these problems can be fixed. I have some suggestions for the producers and writers of Entourage. Let E manage Drama, allow Ari’s story to continue as is (it’s the only funny part of this season), and give Vince something to do that isn’t serious but can last for more than one episode. These suggestions would form three main plots, which is a manageable number for a show of this length. Then, there can be a fully developed story and comedy at the same time instead of the mess that is currently populating the back half of the 10:00 hour on HBO.