The Existential Entourage — “Entourage”
I was a fan of Entourage in the ’00s, in much the same way I was a fan of telling my internship supervisor about my favorite Curb Your Enthusiasm plots involving misogynistic slurs and blithely tittering to myself over his astonished indignation at my choice of workplace conversation. Obviously, as a young, white, HBO-subscribing male, I felt wholly intellectually entitled to the content therein, and Entourage was the cream of the crop. I mean, it wasn’t the funniest show on HBO, Curb was. It wasn’t the most glamorous, since The Sopranos still had all the prestige. It wasn’t the most groundbreaking; The Wire makes everything else at the time seem childish. It wasn’t even the most risqué, as Cathouse marked the de facto end of HBO’s more tawdry era.
But it had “live it,” the tag line on the washed out poster that let you know that as long as you had a swinging dick, you were welcome to this boy’s club for half an hour every Sunday disguised as a single camera sitcom. Where drug addictions resolved over a summer hiatus, the slightest career setbacks yielded massive overcompensatory benediction from God, and Vincent Chase had sex more often than you think about sex when you’re specifically trying not to think about sex while locked in the Denial Chair in Mistress Violet’s Temptation Room.
This is the titular first episode of Entourage, the eight-season HBO series produced by Criminal Mark Wahlberg, ostensibly about his experiences coming from the Northeast to Hollywood with his hometown friends. Because Mark Wahlberg (convicted criminal) is talentless, he writes and directs none of the show, so his contribution likely ends there, and the plot of the series doesn’t follow his career in any further depth — incorporating no parallels to his numerous critical and commercial failures, his embarrassing music career and reality television show, and his repeated series of racially motivated hate crimes, one in which he gouged a man’s eye out with a metal hook while high on angel dust.
I can’t tell if it’s just the usual unnatural rhythm of a pilot’s exposition, or truly because of the shallowness of the content they have to say, but all of the characters seem like children acting in a school play. I find myself instinctively cringing as they interact with model-attractive women because I anticipate the acting to be of the depth of a WWE Diva.
The first moment so depressing that it eats away at my stomach is the profoundly cynical exchange between Turtle and Girl Who Still Hope To Fuck Vince. After explaining to her that the brass ring is already occupied in a ménage à trois with her sister and her best friend, and coyly avoiding her request that he beg, convinces her to “make out” on the promise that he’ll show her where Vince eats breakfast. We fade to black as Turtle delightfully negotiates yet another rape in the swimming pool of misery.
The next morning, E walks past four Latino servants, kicking a soccer ball into one. He apologizes and greets most of them by name, so that the audience can identify him as The Nice One.
Some more intimate scenes with Vince and the Entourage, to make the former come off like a completely hollow, drawing of a person. In a special criminal cameo, they pass Racist Mark Wahlberg and his complicit entourage, one member of which is wearing a FUBU shirt. Perhaps the funniest moment of the episode?
There is a reason Ari Gold eventually becomes the hottest aspect of the show (excepting, arguably, its own salaciousness). He rushes into the third act to save the episode with actual drama — not Johnny Drama (I will make this joke again), or melodrama, just a palpable conflict that the audience can understand in his confrontation with E, elevated by Jeremy Piven’s performance. It’s probably the one thing that really transcends the show, and there will be times they reduce it to self-parody because of just how compelling Ari is, but it’s what we’ve got to work with.
Afterwords, Turtle and Drama shame E for having had a girlfriend by telling him she was giving Vince Vaughn a two-fisted handjob and Vince Chase continues to be an ethereal pixie being by eating fingerlicks of brown sugar as E unloads all of his accumulated pathos upon his empty-headed friend.
Vince and E share some jokes about the cute Asian girl in their class they hope to see at their high school reunion, for which they leave the next day. On their way to the flight, Ari leaves E with a stinger, hinting that everything may not work out for Vinny Chase and The Entourages.
Spoilers, though, it does.
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