Amidst all the sexual debauchery, curse words, movie making, and strip clubs even the boys of Entourage can find some time in their busy day for a little "Bromance." Wait, this doesn't go against Barney Stinson's "Bro-Code" is it?
Last night, Entourage finally returned to us on HBO. While it certainly delivered with the Hollywood lingo, beautiful women and plot twists, no episode would be complete without Ari Gold being a badass.
• Rolling Stone is opening a theme restaurant in LA, believe it or not. [LAT]
• The first issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek hit newsstands today. [NYO]
• MTV's Jersey Shore is off to a very solid start, not surprisingly. [Wrap]
• Entourage has two more seasons left, and then a movie will follow. [THR]
• The NBC-Comcast deal turned into comedy fodder for Conan this week. [NYT]
• Editors at Golf Digest are a bit embarrassed. The headline on the cover of the January issue: "The Top 10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger." [NYP]
• The new issue of Vogue Italia is totally dedicated to Twitter. [R29, TC]
• Tom Brokaw and his wife were almost killed in a car crash today, but escaped unharmed. A woman in another car died in the incident. [NYP]
If you thought you might be rid of Vinnie Chase and the boys anytime soon, think again (insert Ari Goldesque homophobic epithet here). The gang is taking it to the big screen!
So you wanna be a hotshot agent like Ari on that horrible Entourage show? Well, you'll probably have to start out as an assistant, which means you'd better have a trust fund or an insatiable fondness for ramen noodles.
• More on the decision by Condé Nast to shut down Portfolio. [NYO, Gawker]
• Newspaper circulation figures for the past six months show steep declines at most major papers, including the Times, Post, and Daily News. One bright spot: the Wall Street Journal, which experienced a tiny, 0.6% gain. [E&P]
• Phil Falcone's Harbinger, the hedge fund that battled for a piece of the New York Times Co. last year, may now be looking to unload its stake. [WSJ]
• CNN has fallen behind MSNBC and Fox News, as you may have heard. [NYT]
• PRWeek is going monthly. But it'll still be called PRWeek, so you know. [NYT]
• Obsessed starring Beyonce was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. [THR]
Jeremy Piven faced quite the gauntlet at last night's Globes: a press pack hungry to douse him in soy sauce and eat him alive, plus his aggrieved former Broadway costar, Elisabeth Moss.
Entourage last night offered a fairly brisk half-hour that balanced the science fiction of Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Turtle displaying palpable screen chemistry with a fairly easier-to-swallow story involving Vinnie getting fired by a Wolfgang Petersen-type on the set of the extremely timely Smoke Jumpers. As Ari desperately tries to get the director replaced, loyal assistant/stapler target Lloyd runs through a list of names, offering only commode-demolishing Zack and Miri director Kevin Smith as being available. The suggestion tees up another Ari sledgehammer—we won't give it away except to say Red Velvet gluttony is involved—which elicited this reaction from Smith on his message board:
As we suggested yesterday and was rumored by the trades, ABC's whimsical dark comedy Pushing Daisies—about a saturnine pie maker who can bring dead people back to life with a single touch—may be facing an unresurrectable demise. In fact, it's very likely the subject of this morning's lead blind item, about a show that's secretly been canceled. The show premiered strong enough last year, but then was perhaps mortally wounded by the writers strike last spring. So it's in danger, yes. Which is a shame because it's got a talented cast (especially its balefully sexy lead Lee Pace and the always chipper and reliable Kristin Chenoweth) and inspired (if a tad too cutesy at times) writing. In fact, there are several other shows that should be canceled before Daisies is. We'll list three of them after the jump.
President-elect Obama asked Illinois Congressman and hard-charging political attack dog Rahm Emanuel to be his Chief of Staff. Emanuel's brother is Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood agent who famously broke away from ICM to start his own agency. On the HBO series Entourage, Jeremy Piven plays an incredibly thinly veiled fictional version of Ari Emanuel, named Ari Gold. Ari Gold, in the new season of Entourage, was weighing an offer to leave his agency to head a studio. Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel still hasn't decided if he wants to stay on as a powerful Congressional Democrat or move to a position of great power but less autonomy in the Obama White House. Above, watch fictional Ari struggle with the choice, and below, real-life Rahm hems and haws on television. Real life imitates fiction imitating the brother of real life.
· TV networks are going bananas with their election night coverage, including competing Times Square broadcasts: ABC on the JumboTron, Fox News on the AstroVision monitor, and MSNBC on the OlbermannGiantForeheadSonic. [Variety] · Rejoice virginal fantasy nerds! Columbia is producing a movie of Deryni Rising, the first book in the Deryni Kingdom cycle— a series set "in a medieval kingdom...of people with psychic and magical abilities." [THR] · Exquisite weirdo Crispin Glover has joined the cast of Tim Burton's motion-capture Alice in Wonderland. He'll play the Knave of Hearts, on trial for tart-stealing treason. [THR] After the jump: Which of the two men to play Mike Brady is joining the cast of Entourage?· If Gary Cole could go ahead and join the cast of Entourage for three episodes, playing Ari's "oldest Hollywood friend," that'd be great. All right! [THR] · Now Paramount is negotiating with Chris Columbus to star in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, which is still set to star Jim Carrey...Believe It or Not! [Variety]
It is already October 15th! How did that happen? I guess you could say that the Earth rotated around the sun a specific number of times and that days winnowed into nights which bled into days and so on and so on in the circle game. I think that's it. So, how have we been spending these ever-marching autumn hours? Watching TV, of course! Lots and lots of TV. Some has been good (Mad Men, The Daily Show), some has been bad (90210), and some has just been puzzling (Two and a Half Men?). So as we approach the ever-important November Sweeps Week—when networks set their ad rates based on inflated, extraordinary episodes that don't actually reflect typical week-in, week-out quality—let's take a second to give a quarter term report card. How has television been faring, you know, quality-wise (because we already know that ratings are in the toilet)? We'll analyze after the jump.
What's to be done when you've exhausted every conceivable scenario in which to place your series's quartet of homoerotically bonded ne'er-do-wells? In Entourage's case, it means sending them to the desert with Eric "Abs of Steel" Roberts and a bag of magic mushrooms for a mind-expanding journey towards should-Vince-or-shouldn't-Vince-do-a-Benji-movie enlightenment.The result is something akin to what might happen if the CAA Death Star were to hover off from its Century City docking bay and touch down gently in the middle of the Burning Man festival. In the clip above, Ari loses the group, and in the process, all control of his perverse, stranglehold-reliant existence. Is it any wonder that as he panics among the boulders, he turns to his own rock—fiercely loyal gaysian henchman Lloyd—for guidance? With a sixth season announced today, we look forward to future episodes in which the lovable foursome pull off their socks and inject some of Roberts's premium brown sugar between their toes in a heroin-fueled attempt at divining whether or not Vinnie should take on the lead in Eight Below 2. [Entourage]
· Jimmy Kimmel will return to host his fifth American Music Awards in November; confirmed musical guests include Pink and the Jonas Brothers, who will honor the institution with a Grobanesque medley of songs by influential winners like Kris Kross, New Kids on the Block, Kool and the Gang and many others. [AP] · HBO just picked up Entourage for a sixth season, thus ensuring at least two more years of Emmy retribution against host-bashing awards perennial Jeremy Piven. [THR] After the jump: Michael Douglas has a party, Woody Harrelson has a complex, and Bull Durham plots a return by Costner demand.· Eighteen years after giving the hardware to his father, the American Film Instutute selected Michael Douglas to receive next year's Lifetime Achievement Award. [BBC] · Kat Dennings is in talks to co-star in Defendor, featuring Woody Harrelson as a man who believes he possesses superhero powers and Dennings as the ADD-afflicted, poor-spelling neighbor girl who gives him his name. [THR] · Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon are all reportedly in talks to return for Bull Durham 2: The Beer League Years. [Page Six] · Crisis averted! After less than a day of protests, Bollywood's dancing girls and nearly 100,000 other actors, filmmakers and crew concluded their big-budget production Kuchi Kuchi Pay Us Bitches in record time. [NYT]
