Don't be such a posse!
If you're a man, though, and are therefore free to kick up your heels and relax and enjoy the fact that you're wrong all the time, then you'll probably want to hear about the brand new season of HBO's "Entourage" (premieres 10 p.m. EDT on Sunday, April 8), in which a spirited ensemble of wisecracking dicktards hangs out, plays video games, gives each other shit, and festoons their general environs with lots of ass cheek.
Yes, ass cheek is merrily strewn about on "Entourage," as is the kind of witty banter that is neither witty nor banter, really, just idle ribbing and eye-rolling that reminds you of just how charmless and mundane these guys are, with their backward baseball caps and their shiny cars and their competitive flirting. They don't actually flirt, either, they just mention that they're with It Boy Vince. Mistaking these guys for smooth-talking Romeos is like mistaking a pilot fish for a shark. That's the punch line here, sort of -- so why does it never seem like the writers are in on the joke?
But as irritating as Vince's (Adrian Grenier) crew can be, Ari (Jeremy Piven) more than makes up for it this season with his manic, thoroughly entertaining schemes and crises of conscience. Obviously Piven has always been the main (and sometimes only) reason to watch "Entourage," and whenever he's absent from the action, the show suffers. But this season, I'm happy to say, Ari is front and center, with all of his usual swagger and panicking and absurd shifts in perspective. In fact, Piven is better than ever, gesturing wildly and dashing around in circles and milking each line for every last ounce of comedy,
It's bizarre, really, how lively and fun Ari's story lines are, when the rest of those guys are so patently dull. I like Vince just fine, and the addition of Carla Gugino as his new agent, Amanda, is fantastic -- loyal chickens will recall how adamantly I recommended the downward-spiraling series "Threshold," largely because of Gugino's appeal as a heroine. I'm even willing to admit that Drama (Kevin Dillon) is a solid, sometimes funny character, and his pathetic maneuvering is a nice counterpoint to Vince's superstar life -- although the worst episode of last season, in which Drama imagines that his massage therapist is gay, was an unmitigated disaster. But Eric (Kevin Connolly) and Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) are both weak. Turtle speaks entirely in frat boy clichés, and Eric is at once bland and unlikable. These two may be realistic -- they do act exactly like the kinds of seriously dull guys that would follow their star friend around instead of getting lives of their own -- but that doesn't mean we want to spend a second of our time with them.
I'm going to go out on a disappointingly small limb here and say that "Entourage" probably appeals to men more than it does to women. Even though I'm always right, I don't pretend to grasp the innermost machinations of the male mind or what makes its tiny little gears grind and whir. That said, though, the first few episodes of this season of "Entourage" are some of my favorites so far, and Ari provides enough hearty laughs to counterbalance Vince's posse of flaccid sidekicks.
Next page: Blathering on about epidurals ... and the Bada Bing!