The Sheila Variations

A quick note

The show Entourage is SO BAD. It sounds bad, if that makes sense. You don't even need to SEE it, to realize the bad-ness. I had the TV on last night - I was washing dishes in the other room. Entourage came on. I dried the dishes. And could HEAR the badness of the show emanating through my apartment. The voices don't sound real (especially that fat guy in the entourage who wears the backwards baseball cap. He is particularly bad - and unable to make even the line: "Hey, what's up?" sound normal and like real life.) Jeremy Piven (as the arrogant agent) is funny, and over-the-top. I like him. He's so awful that you know it's based on real life. He's actually ACTING. The other guys, to me, seem to have the following subtext for all of their performances: "Hey, man, look how cool I am! I'm in an HBO series!! Just like The Sopranos!" Like: guys, I don't give a crap if you're on HBO. You actually have to ACT and do some WORK in order for me to care about the show and its plot. I bet the actors on Six Feet Under were thrilled to have landed such an awesome gig. But - duh - they get down to work and concentrate on THE ACTING, because otherwise: who cares?? Barely any of the guys on Entourage actually, uhm - you know - CREATE A CHARACTER. Guys: If your character's emotional through-line is: "Hey, Mom, look! I'm on HBO!" = then you're all doing really really good jobs, and congratulations. Other than that? Most of you get Fs. Besides Piven, I'm also impressed by Kevin Connolly who somehow survives the horrible script with his talent intact. He somehow makes his lines sound real - he always makes sure that he's not just playing the line, and has other stuff going on (like we do in real life. We say stuff like: "I'm having a great day" and people can tell that we actually are NOT having a great day. We're distracted, or pissed, or stressed. Things are never exactly what they seem - at least not with intelligent acting) Kevin Connolly's character actually seems like he has a PULSE. Fat-kid-with-baseball-cap only "plays the line", and by that I mean: If the line is: "I'm really pissed" then that actor wears his "i'm really pissed" face. If the line is: "Yo, I'm psyched!" - then whaddya know, his face wears his "Yo, I'm psyched" expression. Terrible unimaginative acting. Fire him.) I don't blame the actors totally - it's not totally their fault. There's only so much you can do with a lifeless script. But Connolly - even though the script has NO DEPTH (like I must reiterate: I can hear and feel the lack of depth from another room in my apartment) - he seems to come out of it seeming like a real person, with real problems. He's also a viable romantic lead because of this. Unlike the actual lead of the show, who is supposed to be a heart-throb, but comes off as ... just a nothing. With a kind of a dumb blank smile. Who wants to watch a romance with a "nothing" as the lead? Connolly seems enough like a real guy, that I (as a chick) want to see him in a romantic situation. That is the perfect way to describe "a romantic lead". People in the audience WANT to see him (or her) kiss and hug and be lovey-dovey. Not everybody has it, and a lot of times it's counter-intuitive who "has" this thing. Anyway, whatever. Connolly has that thing.

I've only seen the show once or twice, but damn. It's a piece of crap. Kevin Dillon sucks. All the extraneous characters suck. The female characters are a JOKE.

Sometimes it's only after watching a show for 10 minutes or so that the light dawns: "Wow. This is bad." But: I was in the kitchen, and the show was on in the other room ... and I could tell. It wasn't just the voices, or the stilted quality of the script. It was the feeling of the entire enterprise. The bad-ness of Entourage is at a molecular level.