Grid Effect

Sorry for the incredibly late post, between four hours of sleep and an early meeting, I couldn’t get to the Entourage overview in time. Anyways, here’s a hyphenated post so to speak, I’ll try to make up for it in the oncoming days…

It seems to be a mutual understanding that this show is entirely too sympathetic to the Vince Chase character. Possibly because it’s produced by Mark Wahlberg (though I’m not sure how responsible he is for what ends up on film) and he would have a natural proclivity to regard Vince as just, I assume this is why we get an arrogant movie star portrayed understandingly. However, between his smug disposition combined with his naivete when it comes to film production as a business, we are left with an almost despicable, and at the very least unrelatable character (at least in several ways, an I’m not even sure if anyone involved with the series realizes this).

With that said, they bring along someone like Nika and she is entitled, shallow, manipulative, angry, selfish and apparently hypocritical…between her and her middle eastern husband with his undisclosed intentions, Vince & Co. seem grounded as a result. Honestly, is it that difficult to encompass likeable characters in this series? I would much rather they refuse to do business with the financier because he wanted to cast Sylvester Stallone in a significant role. And of course, they both want Vince to sleep with Nika to finalize the deal. At least it wasn’t predictable, I wasn’t expecting the husband to encourage it as well.

The Turtle date was, for all intensive purposes, exceedingly lame. I don’t mind the direction they are taking with it, but there is no indication as to why either party would be so intent on dating the other. At least Jerry Ferrara is getting some individual face time, usually he’s a catalyst for Drama and always a supporting character.

Speaking of Drama, I actually felt he had a legitimate complaint about the whole Rush Hour III debacle. Not that he should have been spouting to everyone he knows without at least meeting with Ratner, but after all his boasting it saved us the painfully awkward scenes of Drama explaining himself to everyone. We have seen Drama humiliated one too many times this season.

This is the penultimate episode of the third season, with the fourth picking up on June 20th. Two weeks after the third season concludes (Thanks for the material, Ellin). So there isn’t going to be too much downtime between the start of the fourth season and this upcoming episode on the June 3rd (HBO always gives its original series holiday weekends off) and I wouldn’t expect much closure on any of these storylines. At the very least, I hope its Ari-centric.