Entourage Review

As a hangout show it works. The pleasure is in the rhythm of four men insulting each other in a car, the parade of actors playing exaggerated versions of themselves, and a Los Angeles rendered as a permanent sunny afternoon of restaurants and premieres. Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold is a genuinely great comic character, a man who converts pure hostility into deal making, and Kevin Dillon's washed up brother is the only one of the group with anything approaching a real problem. It is weaker as drama.

Every crisis, a lost role, a firing, a blown deal, is resolved within an episode or two, usually by a phone call from someone powerful who likes them, so eight seasons pass without anyone changing or losing anything. Adrian Grenier's movie star is a blank at the centre. The treatment of women has not aged into anything defensible; they exist as conquests, obstacles or rewards, and the show's own view of that is uncritical. It is a fantasy and never pretends otherwise: as easy to live inside as television gets, carried by the best agent anyone has written, and a fair document of what its industry believed about itself.