The ‘Entourage’ Guilt/Pleasure Index: All That and a Bag of Dildos

Our DVR summary of tonight’s episode read, “Ari mishandles a secret script.� What? Ari? Who’s that? Wait, now we remember him — he’s the short one who shouts a lot and jerks around like he’s been shot by a Taser. Yes, after several painfully dry weeks, Hurricane Ari returned last night in full force! No wonder this is the one show we can’t stop watching–slash–can’t stop hating ourselves for watching!

Episode: “Sorry, Harvey�

Pleasure: We rejoin Ari, our potty-mouthed knight, as he glides into a cemetery for a meeting with M. Night Shyamalan. There, the director (playing himself, in a much more convincing effort than his role in Lady in the Water) hands Ari the much-coveted secret script for his next big project. Meanwhile, E tries to work up the nerve to tell the mad producer Harvey that they’re not selling him Medellin after all. And Drama takes the mayor of Beverly Hills (character-actor hero Stephen Tobolowsky!) out for a night on the town, in hopes of convincing him to annex Drama’s condo into the coveted 90210 area code. But the mayor has one request: Vince has to help him bag a young lady. Which he does. Sort of.

All that and a bag of dildos!

See, Ari’s car gets swapped by the valets at a restaurant, so instead of Shyamalan’s top-secret script in his trunk, it’s the aforementioned duffel bag of anatomically correct fun. Which leads to the second best line of the night, when Ari says to Mrs. Ari, “Now why would I buy a big black cock?� Which leads to the best line of the night, from the editor of this blog, when he e-mailed us afterward: “In Hollywood today, what’s a more embarrassing thing to have in your trunk: a bagful of dildos, or an M. Night Shyamalan screenplay?�

Guilt: Well, given the bag of dildos and the subplot in which the mayor’s hot pickup turns out to be a she-male (complete with a climactic video clip on TMZ.com in which “she� flashes “her� junk to the camera), you might say this episode was a little crotch-obsessed. However, after last week’s festival of rim jobs, this actually qualifies as moving in a more demure direction.

Otherwise, the episode was refreshingly on point. The show’s co-creator, Doug Ellin, took the writing credit on the episode, and we hope he’ll take a firm hand on the rest of the season, given how much better this week was than the last few painful outings. Also, please, Santa: more Ari. Lots of Ari. The more Ari, the merrier.

The Guilt/Pleasure Index:

—Adam Sternbergh