Grid Effect

Jamie-Lynn Sigler is set to appear in three episodes of Entourage’s upcoming season. This isn’t entirely surprising, as HBO seems to have a fraternity of actors to which they rely on and guest star on multiple original programs for the once vaunted cable network. Just off the top of my head I can tell you that Wee-Bey and Herc from The Wire and Big Pussy’s FBI contact in season two have made cameos on Entourage.

So to see Meadow Soprano follow suit isn’t terribly surprising. I mean, she seemed to regress as the series went on and by the time it ended, Robert Iler (whom we’re sure will do well in the future, but probably not in the acting field) had surpassed her in terms of on-screen persona. Seems hard to believe considering how great she was in the third season. Lets just regard this turn of events as of Yankees-Red Sox 2004 ALCS proportions.

She’s either impossible to deal with or professionally inept, because there isn’t any other reason for the lack of work.

I don’t know if she is so closely identified as Meadow that she can’t find any other roles, or private matters or the professional decisions she’s made outside of The Sopranos or if she’s simply inefficient as an actress, but whatever it is, her turn as Heidi Fliess didn’t exactly have casting agents knocking down her door.

This is all very daunting. If you go back to the second season, she seemed like one of the few actors who would actually have a steady, secure acting career post-mob family drama series (Gandolfini, Imperioli and maybe Falco being the others). She was young (still is), attractive (dido) and charismatic enough (could be, but she was on camera for maybe five minutes all last season) that she demanded a lot of screen time. One could actually make the argument that the biggest detriment to her career was her character going to college, because after her freshman year she was seldom seen. From season four on, any and all buzz from the series seemed to shift to the elder characters and Chris.

Never the less, we’re looking forward to seeing her arc as Turtle’s unstable girlfriend, but if it revives her career in any way we’ll be rather shocked. I mean, their are exceptions, it seems to have done wonders for Emmanuelle Chirqui, but very little to boost Mandy Moore’s profile, which was already relatively high and admittedly remains so. Sigler’s pre-Entourage girlfriend falls somewhere in between those two.

Anyhow, best of luck to her, but she’ll always be the X-head who stole and crashed her presumptive boyfriend’s car to us.