Entourage Season Finale--Exhilarating!

The Flaming Nose has given a lot of attention to Sunday night series, and quite a few of our favorites are wrapping up their season's tonight. Let me be the first to say farewell to Entourage, which ended it all on a roller coaster ride of Hollywood disaster and glee, but stopped just short of a cliche cliff hanger.

I hope I'm not a spoiler tonight, but if you're reading the Flaming Nose instead of watching all the great TV out there then you deserve to have your ending stolen.

What I love most about this series is that it has put the fun back into show business. For those sweat shop workers out there who still work in media (TV, Movies, Internet), you know what I'm talking about. Our days are spent hunched over laptops fielding 200 email messages, or hand cuffed to a Blackberry that beeps at us like a Nazi commandant. If it's a weekday; cocktail lunches in Beverly Hills and poolside shenanigans with anorexic starlets have become rarer than rain in Los Angeles. Everybody's too worried about their 401K. But on Entourage, the sun still shines...the Lear jets still roar, and hard bodies still glisten on pristine beaches around the world while they wait for the cell phone call from Ari to tell them that the next picture is a go.

This season found Vince, the action hero with the face of a Greek God and the emotional range of a butternut squash, on the wrong side of La Cienega Boulevard in the hierarchy of Hollywood. He's box office poison, and has been canned by the psychotic German director from the fire-fighting movie that was going to put him back on the A list. How precient, by the way, that while these episodes aired, LA was in the midst of a real fire storm, with the Santa Ana winds immolating so many neighborhoods that even Bel Aire and Beverly Hills couldn't ignore the smell of smoke in the air.

At the end of the tequila drenched day, Entourage is about friendship...the comraderie of the pack. But I like to see it as an homage to the magic of Hollywood. Where a dweeb like Turtle (who looks and dresses exactly like a character out of a Bazooka bubble gum comic) can be romanced by a hot television starlet. Where an actor who was once the top of the heap, can't even get a reading with an indie director, and thinks it's all over. Until Ari the Agent who can part the ocean calls and says..."Scorcese wants you as the lead in his next picture". (Small note to Martin Scorcese's agent; even though he is one of the greatest living motion picture directors in the world, has anyone noticed what an awesome, funny, quirky character actor he is? The American Express card commercial with Tina Fey? This cameo in Entourage? Hello? Just saying.)

A special shout out to Kevin Dillon who plays "Drama", Vince's brother and a budding TV star. He is surely one of the greatest talents of this amazing series, and is consistently hilarious in every episode. The funniest line of tonight's finale belonged to him, as he announced he was going to "jump off the fucking Triborough Bridge" after discovering Turtle's tryst with celebrity Jamie Lynn was real.

Entourage Season 5 is over, and it passed too quickly. If you blinked or didn't TiVo, you missed it. But it was a great ride and I can't wait for the boys to be back in town next year.