As 'Entourage' Enters Its 7th Season, Can't Decide, Is It Over for the Boys?

As I watched the trailer for the seventh season of Entourage -- which premieres on June 27 on HBO -- I couldn’t decide: Has this show run its course yet or is there some more drama to be enjoyed here?

Last season was wildly uneven and I started getting that been-there, done-that feeling as I grew increasingly irritated with nearly every character, most of whom felt stagnant man-boys (with the exception of E, who finally seems to be growing up).



HBO’s new promo asks the question, what happens after you’ve got it all? Well certainly you’d have a lot to lose, but haven’t we already gone that route with these characters, specifically in season four when, on the heels of the success with Aquaman, Vince's career plummeted after Medellin?

Is anyone looking forward to Entourage’s new season?

Golden Globe Nominations: The Good, the Bad & the Odd

Meryl vs Meryl. Meryl Streep is legend for her superb, award winning dramatic acting chops. Now it appears as though she’s conquered the world of comedy as well. This morning’s announcement by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that she’s competing for a Golden Globe best actress in a comedy film award against herself, just makes it official: Meryl is the greatest actress of all time. This year she was nominated for her portrayal of Julia Child in Julie & Julia, and for her dramatization of a divorced mom who has an affair with her ex (Alec Baldwin) in the yet-to-be-released It’s Complicated.

Love for the Families. HBO's Big Love got three nominations for its solid third season in the categories of best TV drama, best TV actor in a drama for Bill Paxton and best supporting TV actress for Chloe Sevigny. ABC's Modern Family – which just aired one of the funnniest Christmas episodes I’ve seen – got a nod with a best comedy show nomination. I hope it kicks some comedy behind at the Golden Globes.

Enough with the Boring, Spoiled Boys Already. Why is Entourage even in the best comedy series running this year? Why not Parks & Recreation instead? Entourage was wildly uneven and I found myself getting seriously bored on many occasions and feeling as though the adolescent boy/never grew up/has no responsibilities shtick was getting tiresome.

In Dire Need of Some Texas-Sized Love. Where was Friday Night Lights, trusty Coach Eric Taylor and Principal Tami Taylor in the mix here? This show gets no love, honestly, it’s like the Gilmore Girls of the awards set.

Baffling TV Comedy Actress Selections. Why on earth did Courteney Cox get nominated for the abomination that is Cougar Town? Certainly Amy Poehler from Parks & Recreation is loads funnier, in that wry, Bob Newhart kind of way in its much-improved second season. The Association could’ve also, instead, put Sofia Vergara from Modern Family into that slot, or even Patricia Heaton from The Middle.

And while I’m on the subject of comedy actresses, why is Edie Falco’s excellent Nurse Jackie depiction competing in the comedy category? I really like Showtime's Nurse Jackie but as a comedy? Dramedy maybe. Straight out comedy, no. Ditto for the United States of Tara, also from Showtime and whose lead actress, Toni Collette, is nominated in the comedy category.

HBO Crushes Other Networks. One stat that is likely horrifying the brass at the broadcast networks: HBO got 17 nominations, one less than the combined number of nominations of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. AMC – home of Mad Men which got three nominations for best drama, best actor (the exquisite Jon Hamm), best actress (January Jones) -- got as many nominations as did ABC.

Anything please/displease you about the slate of Golden Globe nominees (find the whole list here)?

Image credit: Adam Taylor/ABC.

Suburban Mom's Pop Culture Week: Hamm on Talk Shows, Julie & Julia and Classic Kerouac

TV:

To be honest, I've been DVRing talk shows all week to catch Jon Hamm talk without saying anything of substance about the season three premiere of Mad Men on Conan, Fallon & Good Morning America, watching marathon Red Sox games (like last week's 15-inning losing battle against the sinister Yankees) and cringing as Kate Gosselin also visited the talk show circuit, including her terribly awkward chat with the clueless Regis Philbin who apparently is the only person on earth who thinks there's a chance in hell that Jon and Kate will reconcile. Other than those things and the latest episode of Entourage -- which'll be the subject of an upcoming stand-alone post -- I haven't caught much TV this past week.

Sitting in my DVR queue are two episodes apiece of HawthRNe (which just got renewed for a second season) and Rescue Me, plus I've got to catch up on Weeds and Nurse Jackie with my Showtime On Demand because I'm behind a couple episodes with those as well. (I blame my backlog of unwatched material on my new puppy Max who likes to howl in the middle of the night, for long stretches of time, who's got me feeling like a sleep deprived new mother. It's easy to blame the pup. He doesn't read my blog.)

Oh, I AM planning on watching a niche drama on Sunday night, LIVE. It's on AMC. Maybe you've heard of it . . . something about ad men in the 1960s . . .

DVDs:

Last week I was all wrapped up in season two DVDs of Mad Men for a column I was working on and am just about finished with watching the first season thirtysomething DVDs in preparation for another piece (have one episode left). Don't know what I'll watch on DVD when I'm done with these two shows. Maybe I'll finally watch the Milk Netflix DVD I have sitting, unloved, next to the TV.

Movies:

While I haven't seen any movies this week -- save for the tail-end of Message in a Bottle which I caught on cable and made me instantly tear up because I'm a sentimental fool -- I'm hoping to see Julie & Julia this weekend. Reviews have been stellar. I think my best plan of action will be to eat something halfway decent before walking into the theater, otherwise I'll be distractedly ravenous during the entire thing.

Books:

Finally finished re-reading The Time Traveler's Wife and sniffled my way through the end. Again. Even though I knew how it ended, it still made me cry and ponder Clare Abshire's life choices. Wonder if the movie -- which is, unfortunately, getting mixed reviews -- aptly translates the dense, long and somewhat complicated book. I hope that it does a decent job because that's on my "to see in the theater" list.

After completing Time Traveler, I was browsing through my bookcase at books I own but haven't yet read and pulled down a 1959 edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (a paperback that once belonged to my mom). I've never read any Kerouac. It's time I change that.

Image credit: From this web site.

Suburban Mom's Pop Culture Week: Potter, Entourage, thirtysomething, Time Traveler's Wife

I've been mired in the doldrums of mid-summer amid inclimate, rainy days, bickering kids and having to take one of those kids to multiple appointments intended to rid her left ankle of pain. Amid that, here's what I've been consuming in the pop culture this week:

Films:

-- I took my twin 10-year-olds to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince soon after it opened nationwide. Had we not all read the book, we would've given it an unequivocal thumbs up, enthusiastically so. But given that we did read the book, it was hard not to be irritated by many of the changes made in the film version, including in the pivotal scene at the end where Harry was supposed to be immobilized by a spell, at least he was in the J.K. Rowling version. The way it played out in the film made Harry look wimpy.

That being said, I think that upon a second viewing -- when it comes out on DVD -- the kids and I will be more able to fully embrace the movie as the well done, two-plus hours of stylistic fantasy that it is. The teen actors are believable and many elicited emotions (laughter, tears) from yours truly, as well as from many other members of the audience in the theater.

-- Finally saw Hancock On Demand over the weekend with The Spouse. (Milk, which I got from Netflix about a week-and-a-half ago, is still sitting next to the TV.) It wasn't bad, but I'm a Will Smith fan so I'm predisposed to liking him. However I thought the "romantic" twist was silly and not well thought out. It could've easily played out better as a straight super-hero epic and been perfectly fine as an action hero flick without it.

TV:

-- I had an imaginary question mark lingering over my head after the recent episode of Entourage, where everything seemed to be unfolding re-al-ly, re-al-ly, sl-o-w-ly. Terrain that's already been trod is being revisited, which is growing tedious. Plus, I, frankly, could care less about Ari's business partner's extra-marital fling, though I find it interesting that Ari himself, to the best of my recollection, has not strayed from "Mrs. Ari."

I'm planning to stick with da boys throughout the season, although I'm starting to believe that this slow motion, underwater feeling I get when I watch the HBO show isn't going to go away any time soon.

-- Post-All Star Game Boston Red Sox games have been depressing, y'all. Now the Sox have fallen out of first place in the AL East, replaced by the Evil Empire. It's sad, yes, but I'm of the mind that the Sox fare better when they're underdogs as opposed to the top dogs. It's what kept Sox fans going through an 86 year championship drought.

-- I'm going to write about this subject AT EXTREME LENGTH soon, but I've been spending time traveling back to the year of 1987 with Keds, enormous shoulder pads, cassette tapes, Reagan and in which there was no internet, no cell phones, no e-mail, no BlackBerries, no On Demand. Why? I've been screening the first season of thirtysomething on DVD (goes on sale next month) in preparation for a column or two. I, a long time fan of the show, am in Michael and Hope Steadman heaven.

Books/Magazines:

-- I finished Half-Blood Prince and then polished off Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but couldn't put away my box of tissues (the end of the both of those books make me snivel), because I started re-reading The Time Traveler's Wife. (The film based on this book comes out next month.) It's almost like reading it for the first time because it's been so long since I first cracked it open. After the past season of Lost, which featured mucho time traveling, the whole notion of moving back and forth through time now seems old hat.

-- For some reason I've recently found myself coveting recipes in Martha Stewart Living Magazine which have inspired me to stray from my food rut (a rut inspired by the aforementioned kids, two of whom rarely eat anything I make). I've been gazing at the recipes, the photos of what the food I prepare will never look like and hoping that when I present the food to the picky eaters, they'll be won over by the beauty and delectable aromas. Then I serve a Stewart meal -- shrimp, chorizo and veggies on a skewer over a bed of saffron rice (it was my idea to use saffron rice) -- and at least one kid requested a grilled cheese instead. This is the reason why my trying to cook anything from a lifestyle magazines tends to depress me.

What's your week of pop culture look like?

Image credit: Barnes & Noble.

Suburban Mom's Pop Culture Week: Entourage, Wired & a Small Film With a Kid Named Potter

TV:

-- The sixth season of HBO's testosterone-heavy Entourage premiered on Sunday and I've got to agree with a blogger from New York Magazine who said that it felt a bit dated with stuff like Vinnie appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, given that Conan O'Brien has taken the reins. Ari made reference to his agency signing the star of My Name is Earl, a show that's now cancelled. "For a show that derives a great deal of its energy from the fact that it's supposed to feel recent and insider-y to viewers, these two factual slipups have us thinking that the show's creators are committed to once again running this season on autopilot," wrote Mark Graham.

That being said, it was a surprisingly mellow, low-keyed Entourage premiere, which quietly established the groundwork for the boys to finally be showing some inklings of budding maturity and no longer acting like, in Sloan's words, they live in "a frat house." It's about damned time. The women on this show always seemed light-years more mature than the men, except for E, who seemed like the only responsible boy in the bunch, though he has been susceptible to caving into pressure to be cool and go out with the dudes. (Vinnie is JUST getting his driver's license? How much arrested development does Vinnie have?) Will something like a suddenly mature Turtle change the dynamics of the show? Of course, but change can be good. Just ask the Lost people.

Additionally, I loved the Mad Men reference when Ari defended drinking the office in the middle of the day and Lloyd quipped that it won't seem so cool when the AMC show flashes forward to the 1970s and Don Draper & Co. have heart and liver disease.

-- Watched some of the episodes from the final season of Gilmore Girls that I DVRed over the past few weeks. ABC Family, which has been running Gilmore Girls repeats for years, in June finally got permission to air the final season, the one which saw Lorelai and Christopher marry, then divorce; Lane have twins and Rory graduate from Yale and turn down a marriage proposal while she went off to cover the Obama campaign. I only saw those episodes once after they were aired, so it's been nice to see them again, though the seventh season wasn't one of my favorites. Whenever I catch episodes from the first two seasons, I realize how much of that distinct, fresh, quirky something the later seasons were missing.

-- Are money and ratings the only reasons for the MLB All-Star Game to start at 8 p.m.? (Actually, the first pitch didn't happen until 8:50 p.m.) If this is supposed to be "America's favorite pastime," why is it on TV so late? Why can't it take place on a weekend day so that kids and people who work for a living can watch it? My children went to bed at 10 p.m. and only were able to catch an hour of actual play. (I DVRed the rest of it for them and they'll watch it later.) I'm completely on board with a column Stephen King wrote a while back in Entertainment Weekly lamenting this late-night practice and how TV had "ruined" baseball.

-- I'm eagerly anticipating the arrival -- via snail mail -- of Mad Men's season two DVDs. (Is it time for that show to premiere yet?) I'll be sure to post here after I've soaked it all in.

Films:

-- There's a minor movie that just came out last night, at midnight to be exact. You might've heard of it. The lead character's name is something like Palmer? Or Puddy?

My twin 10-year-olds have been literally counting down the hours until we go to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince tomorrow afternoon (tomorrow's the earliest when we can get someone to watch our nearly 8-year-old for whom I believe the film might be too intense). I must admit that I'm kind of psyched to see it as well. Brings out the kid in me. Here's to hoping the film's solid.

-- Over the weekend, The Spouse and I watched Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr. This was one of the films he'd added to our Netflix queue after he found the list to be too heavy with thinky, independent films, TV shows (The West Wing's on the list), romantic comedies and kids' fare. He joked that he'd injected more action-oriented testosterone into the list.

When we sat down to watch Iron Man, I fully expected to hate it, but surprisingly didn't. In fact, I found it very entertaining -- I had no idea there was an Iraq/military arms supplier backstory -- and stayed awake throughout the entire thing. (This is significant because we didn't start the movie until 10 p.m. after a long day of running around with the three kids.) The other Netflix movie sitting next to the TV: Milk. Might have to ply The Spouse with some caffeine beforehand.
Books/Magazines:

-- I finally finished re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and have commenced my second pass through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I'd forgotten how deeply depressing the seventh book of the Potter series is. Nothing but downer after downer. Bleakness everywhere. Kind of puts me in a dour mood. In that world, it sucks to be Harry Potter.

-- I just got the August issue of Wired Magazine in the mail and found it to be packed with intriguing stories and blurbs. (FYI: My liking it has nothing to do with the fact that Brad Pitt is on the cover.) There are pieces on the etiquette of social media -- like should you follow your boss and your boss's boss on Twitter AND friend them on Facebook? -- and a brief musing on something I'd never heard of: a single-serving web site.

What's on your Pop Culture agenda this week? You planning on seeing THE movie of the summer?

Image credit: Warner Brothers via the Examiner.