In "Entourage," the World Is Flat

The endless season of "Entourage" finally came to a close. And something actually happened at long last -- when "Medellin" was greeted by its Cannes audience with a deafening silence. Vince winds up with nothing but a debt for now, while his needy brother Drama is king of the world -- the world being the bizarro world of France, where he is a Jerry Lewis-like star.

But permit me one last rag on "Entourage" until the show returns, renewed I hope, next June. I've always cared for this show, but this season tested my affection. The wandering and filler plots didn't help, for sure, but it was the monotony of the characters that really irritated me. The writers of the show really know how to capture the electricity and psychology of Hollywood deal-making, the way egos clash and things move fast and people like Ari Gold thrive. But they don't have the same facility with character, with creating people who aren't just surface-deep and single-themed.

Traditional sitcom characters often stay surface-deep and single-themed, because that is the nature of the genre. Over the years, a sitcom character may change some, but generally speaking, Joey on "Friends" stays dumb and Elaine on "Seinfeld" stays selfish. But "Entourage" isn't a traditional sitcom, is it? It's an HBO comedy in the same way "Sex and the City" was an HBO comedy, and I expect a little more depth and variety of character.

To me, it seems like each of the four boys of "Entourage" have only one song to sing, over and over again. They're too flat. At one moment, the writers tried to give Turtle something more interesting than his usual Keystone Kops role with Drama, by giving him a real live girlfriend. But that faded away like so many of the show's romantic subplots. Maybe next season, now that Drama is the most successful of the gang, the writers will be able to tease out some different sides of each of the guys.

To be fair, the writers did try to expand at least one character: Jeremy Piven's Ari. Alas, he's the one they should have left alone, as a sort of comic relief. By making him more human, a jealous husband and tearful father, the writers kind of spoiled him. Like Billy Walsh and some of the other Hollywood types, he only benefited from being a parody of himself, one of the crazy goons in Vince & Co.'s amusement park ride through the movie business.