I don’t know why I got excited yesterday when I saw that the premiere of HBO’s Entourage was scheduled for last night. It’s probably the most formulaic show on television right now, no matter how many times HBO likes to remind me during commercials that they aren’t like the other guys. HBO has spent the last decade and a half trying to carve out a niche for itself in the prime-time television world. With the success of The Sopranos, the premium cable channel couldn’t be denied that they fostered talent outside of the network box. This point was driven home by shows like The Wire, and, as I’m told, Big Love. (I’ve never found polygamy so boring.)
And I’ll even give HBO props for the first season of Entourage, and a handful of subsequent seasons (season 3 stands out)… the show had an original premise, a decent cast, given the material, and at least one deservedly admired breakout character in Jeremy Piven’s nerve-strung portrayal of Ari Gould. Maybe that was why I was excited last night. Or maybe it’s because we’re in the middle of summer with no end to the television wasteland in sight, and Entourage has shown up like an oasis for paying cable customers. Bess and I took a break from our West Wing evening marathon (I’m dreaming in Sorkin-speak) and caught last night’s premiere.
Booooring.
I’ve discarded from memory much of what happened in the show’s uneventful opener, but here’s the unsurprising, totally expected gist: Vince is fine again, he’s just finished shooting a movie with Scorcese. He’s on Leno now, not Kimmel. E is trying to move out. Turtle is moving up and Drama has a steady gig. Vince has sex with an anonymous girl who thinks she is above such a thing. (“No means the back of my car!” Creeeeeepy.) Yada. Yada. Yada.
Entourage used to be the sorbet after The Sopranos‘ ribeye dinner. It was 30 minutes of flush. Get those nasty mobsters out of your head and stare at the bright lights of LA and Hollywood. “This could be you,” it would say to its viewers, “These guys are just like you!” In fact, they aren’t. My takeaway from Entourage isn’t that everyone can make it… it’s more like, how the hell did these morons make it? As a pair, Sopranos and Entourage seemed to examine two ends of society’s stupid stick: one family turns to crime, one turns to fame. Both engage in a series of hi-jinks, again, in two different spectrum (dark and light, drama and comedy, satire and slapstick). Alone, however, Entourage wilts. And if the family of shows it’s been paired with is any indication, HBO has lost itself to an ego built on good television now absent. The Wire stands out as the studio’s best effort, up there with miniseries Band of Brothers and John Adams.
Now we have feature shows like Tru Blood, whose premise, while interesting, can’t erase terrible acting or its association with the recent insurgence of vampire pop-myth… most of which reads like internet Dracula fan-fiction. Hung, which I haven’t bothered with yet, sounds near identical to AMC’s Breaking Bad, in which a teacher is forced to engage the darker side of an inherent talent in order to make ends meet in this crazy dog-eat-recession world, or whatever. It’s just that with Hung, it’s about exactly what you think it’s about. Excuse me if I’m having a tough time with the premise of a guy’s phallis being his savior. If the implied allegory is going where I think it is, count me out.
And so I watched Entourage alone last night, and I started to think about The Sopranos and The Wire. Even when the former dipped its feet into existentialism, it was still a really, really, good show. And the latter is the best cop drama I’ve ever seen. Honestly, nothing holds a candle to it, and if you haven’t seen it, get the box set.
HBO should be shopping their coveted Sunday night prime-time slots to people with new ideas that break the mold, not ideas that fit the mold set by precedent success of older shows. And HBO should be mindful of their own measure of success; ending a show at its high-point (Flight of the Conchords, I’m looking at you) is always better than stretching a repetitive plot so thin it becomes transparent, as seems to be the case with Entourage. I used to enjoy drawing parallels to producer Mark Wahlberg’s career (whose turn in Hollywood inspired many of the vignettes here), but now any envy for the lifelong party the characters all seem to inhabit has waned. No one on this show seems to have a purpose anymore. Shake it up a little, HBO. It might be time to threaten the characters with more than just the prospect of living in different houses, or driving different cars.
I mean… didn’t Turtle’s character die in real life?
Just saying.
