I'm so very sorry about the delay, folks. I was at Comic Con this weekend, and yesterday I had an all day wedding. I'm sure you were refreshing The A.V. Club homepage every five seconds wondering what my take on Entourage was, perhaps wondering if there were shots of bathing suits with completely exposed ass cheeks?
Well, wait no more, because there were.
You know what else, though? It wasn't so bad. A few things wrapped up way too neatly, and a few others basically spun their wheels, but there was a good sense of the story (some semblance of one, at least) moving forward, and we got to witness some awesome ping pong courtesy of Uncle Jesse. It was actually alright.
Drama is trying to woo John Stamos because if Stamos doesn't want to do this buddy comedy show, the network doesn't want to make it. So Stamos arrives at the Chase household to meet with Drama, and spends all his time chatting up Vince, who is now his doppleganger. Stamos notices the ping pong table and wants to get a game in, and when Vince suggests Drama play instead, Stamos counters that Drama doesn't have a "ping pong build." Whatever that means. Suddenly, it's on. Drama wins, Stamos sulks off, and we later find out that Stamos actually goes to a personal ping pong trainer and is more bruised by the loss than anyone expected. The weird little celebrity idiosyncrasies Entourage toys with always pay off; the show's meant to be a satirical look at the inside of Hollywood (I think), and those details are the most unexpected and fun to play on. Like playing on a cum-stained ping pong table, aka, the no spin zone.
The worst Entourage—and given the history of the show, I could also say, "most of Entourage"—is way too broad to have much of an impact. I was wondering why Turtle was being flown out to Mexico, and discovering it was all a ploy to get Vince to endorse a tequila brand had me feeling for the guy. Unfortunately, it was one moment out of a thousand clunky ways for Turtle and Alex to "joke" about their non-romance. Every other line was some variation of, "Is it because I won't fuck you?" or "Is it because you won't fuck me?" or "Are you going to fuck me already?" or "I'm going to fuck you already?" By the end, I guess Alex decides to sleep with Turtle—after discussing at length how much she is unattracted to him—because she wants to and totally not because she's trying to get Turtle to bring Vince on board with this tequila thing. And why is she doing this? Because as she says, "I'm a little drunk, so if you ever had a shot at me, now would be the time." What about when she inexplicably stuck her chest in Turtle's face on the airplane? That was certainly…"a" time.
Not much happens on the Ari front. He delivers a pitch to wealthy execs (including Charles Widmore) that lasts about three minutes, and he has a run-in with Lizzie in which she promises to end Ari. Then Andrew Klein calls Ari and tells him Lizzie has it in for him, just as Ari gets another call from an exec who promises him some money. What new thing happened again? The show obviously feels obligated to bring in Ari every week, but they should have ended this one with a more definitive "it's a go" for the football team and "it's going to bite you in the ass" with the Lizzie thing.
But this one was entertaining enough for the ping pong alone, and for the promise of the douchey other manager sticking around to cause more mischief. It's funny how "entertaining enough" on Entourage means I wasn't personally offended too many times, but here we are anyway.