The ‘Entourage’ Guilt/Pleasure Index Gets Meshuggah

It’s Yom Kippur, the perfect opportunity for Ari to atone for his sins. Plus, the studio finally wants Vince for Medellin — except that the very religious studio head (Harris Yulin) is demanding an answer by sundown! Wait a second — why would a very religious studio head set an inflexible deadline for an $80 million movie on the very same high holiday that doesn’t allow him to conduct business? Stop asking questions! No wonder this is the one show we can’t stop watching–slash–can’t stop hating ourselves for watching!

Episode: Return of the King

Pleasure: As mentioned above, the promising Yom Kippur, no-work-on-the-holiday plotline is completely undermined by an illogical plot point so glaring that we have to wonder if we slept through some important information during the first two minutes of the show. (We very nearly nodded off while Drama blabbed on about his car in high school.) Nonetheless, we do get to enjoy one cute joke about Ari keeping a “bat phone” (an extra cell phone in his sock), which his wife confiscates at the synagogue like a drug lord frisking an undercover cop. Oh, and Drama bought a horse.

Guilt: The only purpose of the inane Drama-buys-a-racehorse plotline seemed to be the inclusion of a horse-peeing sight gag — in nearly every sense of the word “gag.” Meanwhile, when Vince’s agent-slash-paramour, Amanda, fails to land Medellin, Vince decides to can her. Then she tells him that the studio head who pulled the plug on Medellin wants to have lunch with him. Oddly, this passes for a reconciliation. Thus, their low-stakes, interest-free romance continues to simmer, even though the Ari-as-the-other-woman scenario seemed tapped out halfway through the season premiere. Not even the presence of the delightfully hyperactive Adam Goldberg, playing producer Nick Rubenstein, could jolt this episode to life; instead, he and Jeremy Piven ended up in a kind of overemoting duel, mano-a-manic, to the death. —Adam Sternbergh