Saturday, December 22, 2007

TV review - "Entourage" Season3 Part 2 and Season 4 ***/*****

Entourage came dangerously close to jumping the shark in the second half of season 3, partly because of the uninteresting character of Vinnie’s new agent and too much time on Ari’s home life, but mostly because there was a lack of high stakes movie plot going on and because they messed with the Vinnie-E dynamic – by making Vinnie more forceful they gave all his lines over to E, and E had nothing to do. As a result many episodes were flat and flabby.
Things picked up towards the end of the season as the boys turned producer, and the ground work was laid for many of the things that made Season 4 so brilliant: E turns into a producer and gets serious about management, giving him lots of scope for conflict with Vinnie and Ari (different sorts of conflict, too, which is great), Johnny Drama finally has some success but they totally make it work by having him be anal and annoying, the character of Billy Flynn has major “legs”, ditto Adam Goldberg’s cocaine sniffing trust fund baby. The only person who doesn’t get to join in on the fun is Turtle – they get up a girlfriend for him in season 3 but then dropped it.
The women are even more stunning and objectified in this one – apart from Dana Gordon, it’s all pretty much boobs and buts (including some from our own Sophie Monk and Emma Lung, playing Poms). But the scripts are consistently funny and inventive and the Cannes finale is a knock out.

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