Summary Judgment: Entourage

I have to post a little caveat about my review of Entourage, in the interests of full disclosure. I have two roommates, and one of them is in love with Entourage. Remember that South Park episode where Cartman starts writing Christian rock songs by taking love songs and replacing the word "baby" with "Jesus," prompting his producer to say that it seems like Cartman doesn't just love Jesus, but that he's actually in love with Jesus? Yeah, it's like that. He doesn't just love the show, he's in love with it. When 10:00 on Sunday approaches, he goes nuts. He screams the theme song, shouts at one of the other of us to turn off the lights, and explodes if either of us makes any noise. Once he said that Entourage should be twice as long, there should be twice as many episodes, and they should replace every other show on television with it. Another time he said that Entourage gives him a reason to live. No joke. So, like I said, in the interests of full disclosure, the way my roommate goes overboard about the show makes me like it less, irrespective of the show's own qualities.

That having been said, that roommate was away this past Sunday, so I was able to watch the show without secretly hating everything about it. You know what? I'm not that crazy about it anyway.

The episode that aired on Sunday was an interesting experiment, though. The gang headed down to South America to film their new movie Medellin, about the drug lord Pablo Escobar. The episode was framed as a documentary film about the making of Medellin by an unseen British filmmaker, and it was a welcome departure from the normal style of the show (though not always consistent--it didn't make sense to intersperse the footage with clips of Ari back in L.A.). The production was plagued with the problems of Billy Walsh, the explosive director. Compromises were made, things exploded, etc. There really isn't much to say about it, besides that they made a movie.

But overall, I was left with one big impression: Medellin looks like it blows. The scenes they showed didn't look very good. The prosthetics fitted to Adrian Grenier's Vincent Chase to enable him to play the chubby Pablo Escobar were laughable. Eric and Vince were running around through the whole third season of this show chasing Medellin like it was some kind of holy grail, but from what I saw in this episode, it really looks like something that could have been a made-for-TV movie. On Telemundo. Between Sabado Gigante and a telenovela. Would it have killed them to make the movie at least look like something I'd want to see?

I'll keep watching, because I have nothing else to do on Sunday nights. Now that I can watch TV on my computer, I'll probably do that instead of having to endure my roommate's masturbatory exclamations of the show's greatness. But it doesn't mean I'll like it any better.