HBO Sunday Night Comedies – Entourage – “No Cannes Do” – Flight of the Conchords – “Actor”

So its my last post, as the Maven has triumphantly returned to the city of angels. Before I talk about my weekly dose of Entourage and Conchords, I want to give a shout out to the Maven for creating and solely maintaining this blog. It’s a ton of work to do, as I found out quickly, even with my sporadic and sometimes too late to be relevant posts. I’m very much looking forward to going back from writer to regular, nameless faceless reader (but still frequent commenter). Lets get to the night of comedy we all just enjoyed.

Entourage

I just don’t care. I can’t sum my feelings up any better than that. I don’t care about any of the characters on Entourage. Some of them have interesting dynamics, but I feel that even the most interesting pairing this week – E and Anna – was concluded ridiculously simplistically. Since when does “I don’t understand” mean: “I want to fire you, but I am going to leave the door slightly open to date you.” I like that E’s conscience got the better of him, especially since it led to him turning his back on Vince to help Anna. I feel that this is the only place the show has left to go – E and Vince split and E attempts to make it on his own. It almost happened in season 2 when Vince was going to reject Aquaman, and I think it will most certainly happen this season. We saw Vince and E have a minor argument, and all it will take is a little he-said she-said for the truth to come out, fragile feelings to be broken, and E and Vince on their own. But seriously, how do you show the best scene of the episode, a scene that absolutely had me on the edge of my seat, then 5 seconds later have E say something that obviously shows that we only saw part of the scene. I don’t like being left in the dark then filled in later, and thats exactly what happened with this scene.

Turtle and Drama once again sat on the sidelines, only teaming up for a mercifully short segment about hunting for some sort of enemy at the airport. Complete filler? Writers’ guilt at leaving them out of the last 2 episodes? A poor attempt at airport/Arab humor? You decide, but I wasn’t buying it.

That just leaves us with Ari and his wife. I have to say, my first line about not caring was directed mainly at this story line. Was it good? It wasn’t funny. I wasn’t interested by it. I didn’t care at all how it ended. Was the acting/writing good? I don’t know, and I don’t care. Entourage has shown that even the most limited actors can make an entertaining show, provided the premise is so interesting, and so enviable, that people can’t help but tune in. However, as some sort of conclusion to my various posts about this show, I pose to you, loyal reader, this question (along with the answer). Can someone consistently enjoy watching a show in which they have zero interest in any of the dramatic progression of any of the characters? If you get real blazed and watch Entourage for 25 minutes each week, then yes.

Click “Keep Reading” for my thoughts on the hilarious LOTR themed Conchords ep, in addition to my teary farewell.

Conchords

In the week since I last posted, I have become thoroughly addicted to Flight of the Conchords. I’m down to watch an episode at any time, and always have at least one of their songs stuck in my head. So, if any of you out there have been half-assed watching it sometimes, like I was, I highly suggest giving it a real chance. On to last night’s ep.

Me being so into Conchords now can be 100% attributed to my good buddy Rich, who I spent almost all of last week with. In that week, we listened to the Conchords EP (full album coming in October) , watched a few episodes on demand, but mostly would burst into a random part of a random song every few minutes. The songs are simply that addictive, funny, catchy, ingenius, etc. Last night’s episode had an amazing one, the Lord of the Rings song. Absolute best part: “There are 9 of us and 4000 of them! We’ll never make it!” “oh no!” “We made it!”. Now that I’ve watched most of the past episodes, I am an enormous fan of Dave (Arj Barker). He steals every scene he’s in.

In addition to the great song last night, I liked the whole deal with the actor pretending to be a record exec, and calling Murray to say good work. It wasn’t my favorite plot, but it was funny, the guy playing the actor was funny, and it led directly to the LOTR video. (Best Actor line: “Oh, you’re from New Zealand! Lord of the Rings! Frodo! The Ring! But don’t let me bore you with my knowledge of New Zealand.”) I’d been hearing about this “Lord of the Rings episode” all week from Rich, and the anticipation for an episode of a comedy was very nice, reminding me of the way I watch the clock for a new ep of The Office or South Park.

As for Murray, he was outstanding again last night, as usual. He is so ridiculous that even the crushing disappointment was hilarious – I never hesitate to laugh at Murray’s idiocy, never once feeling sad for him or his clients. I think it’s a great mark of a show that aims to provide simply comedy – a less well done show would lose some of the comedy element, as any person with a conscience would be forced to feel at least a bit of pity for this pathetic loser (no offense), but in the Conchords universe hes a comedy goldmine.

One last thing about Conchords: It’s highly likely that the reason I enjoy watching the episodes so much more now than before is that my attitude is “I’m going to love this episode, its going to be so funny” instead of “whats this new thing after entourage”. It’s really hard to enjoy a show when you watch with a negative attitude, but so often a negative attitude hovers over TV writing, and as a result TV watching from those who read it, especially in random blogs on the internet like this one. It’s a tough time to be optimistic about every new show, especially ones with names like “Dirty Sexy Money” – a show that I’d be embarrassed to watch based solely on the title. I hate that the easiest way to guarantee decent ratings is to pump up the artificial “sex” factor of a show. It would be a different story if the show actually had sex in it, or its characters were sexier than those in other shows. But its not. Its a show on network TV, and I’ve seen the cast photos, so neither of those things are true. I don’t want to be around to see this: Coming to ABC’s fall 2009 lineup, “Titties”! But a positive attitude coupled with a consistent, decent show is usually enough to have a nice evening of TV watching. I know thats all I ask of any network. Please don’t give shows titles that you think will fool me and my sex and money loving mind into watching it. It insults me and I go to great efforts to make sure that I never watch it or say anything positive about it, completely out of spite.

Thats it for me. Back to your regularly scheduled Maven from here on out. Thanks again to Jonah for trusting me with this responsibility, and thanks to all the people who randomly clicked a link to this site and made it look like a lot of people actually read my posts. But if you actually got some enjoyment out of my brief foray into writing, or were able to correctly uncover the much, much deeper underlying meaning behind my posts, then I have just two words for you. You’re welcome.

-Warsh