The ‘Entourage’ Guilt/Pleasure Index: Die, ‘Medellin,’ Die!

The sun is shining, God is in Her Heaven, and after a brief dalliance (both professional and sexual) with another agent, Vince is back in Ari’s loving arms. All this, and a catheter joke! No wonder this is the one show we can’t stop watching–slash–can’t stop hating ourselves for watching!

Episode: “The Resurrection�

Pleasure: Just when we were ready to start a letter-writing campaign to dump Vince and lobby for an Ari Gold spinoff (working title: You’ve Got Gold), Vince and E reunite with Ari and all is right in the world. Well, almost all — there’s still the matter of Medellin, Vince’s white-whale obsession, which becomes his white-elephant investment. After a producer tries to buy the script, then force Vince to do the schlocky Matterhorn first (it’s Die Hard at Disneyland), Vince and E decide to buy the script themselves. It’s Bialystock and Bloom in Beverly Hills!

Meanwhile, Turtle lands a phone number for an improbably gorgeous sneaker-freak whose father owns a hot-rod shop, and Drama sweats out the brutal reviews for Five Towns, which miraculously winds up as a hit in the overnights — news which he receives while overlooking a spectacular canyon in Arizona in the backseat of a restored vintage convertible.

Guilt: Is it fair to complain for weeks that the show’s lost its way and then, once it returns to fundamentals, complain that we’ve seen it all before? No matter! We press on! As this week’s episode taught us, critics are a bunch of sniveling weenies anyway.

The Vince-and-E, screw the world, “let’s roll the dice� plotline is basically Queens Boulevard redux. Medellin has been around so long that even we wish it would finally rot in development hell. (At least Paul Haggis is no longer attached, which means we won’t have to endure his cameos.) And didn’t Amanda, Vince’s former agent and love-bracelet-giver, disappear a little too quietly? Would a hotshot agent like her let a top client like Vince walk away without even a lawsuit? A screaming match? A threat to dispatch her foot soldiers up and down Wilshire Boulevard to blow his brains out? (Nope —because like all women on this show, once she’s served her purpose, she has the courtesy to make herself scarce.)

Still, all is forgiven, as the prospect of Drama as a successful TV star has loads of promise — a little fraternal rivalry, perhaps? — and the show’s writers got a visit this week from the joke fairy, who left a few vintage Entourage lines under their pillows. Such as Ari’s lyrical comparison of an opponent’s negotiating technique with “taking a steel catheter and shoving it right up my cock.� Or when, as Drama sweats Five Towns, Ari (who else?) consoles him with, “Drama, it’s NBC. They gave Joey 46 episodes. They don’t cancel shit.� —Adam Sternbergh