IT'S A TRUTH SO PURE IT CAN KILL YOU DEAD/A TASTE OF HEAVEN MIXED WITH HELL INSIDE OF MY HEAD: Am I right that there currently are only two half-hour dramas on television? Both Louie and Entourage have elements of comedy, but neither employs as many laugh lines as, say, The West Wing, and both usually, or at least frequently, are built principally around a dramatic (as opposed to comedic) plot. Louie sometimes does a purely sit-com plotline (smoking pot with a neighbor; going on a date with a masturbation opponent), and Entourage always has at least one gaggy secondary or tertiary plot, but at the core, the former is about a fundamentally lonely and discontent man and the latter is about an ambitious and self-destructive actor. The two are even superficially similar, centered around men (and masculinity) in the entertainment business almost entirely cut off from meaningful relationships with adult women.
But surprise. I'm not going to shit all over Entourage right now. I've said a million times that it is a puerile adolescent boy's fantasy, but Doug Ellin and company seem to be trying to grow the show up in this final season. Ellin seems to be tentatively testing the notion of attaching consequences to its characters' conduct, and I don't understand why more people aren't crediting the weirdly genius idea of using Andrew Dice Clay as shorthand for the failure and impending desperate obsolescence that the boys haven't yet had to deal with (excepting Drama's first couple of seasons). No, the show won't be complete until the moment we see a grown woman doing something other than shopping, ball-busting, or undressing, but one at least shouldn't criticize it for moving in the right direction.
All of which is a long way of saying that Entourage deserves slightly better than a comparison to its half-hour drama-mate, which, by doing whatever the hell Louis C.K. (and not network executives) wants, is reshaping the boundaries of broadcastable television. I suspect that FX paired up tonight's episodes because one (the one about God and masturbation) was kind of a clunker. But holy crap, that second episode, "Eddie," was one of the most brutal, clear-eyed, and sad things I've seen on television this year. It's as if Louis C.K. had read all of the first-season reviews about how Louie peeks into the aggression and unhappiness endemic among comedians and decided to kick the door wide open. Even the lone funny part (other than the bookend scenes of Louis C.K.'s stand-up), Eddie's bit at the open mic place, was grotesque, with the bad-comic montage, the yellowy lights, the drug sweat, and Eddie's offhand belligerence. Try to imagine watching this episode two years ago, or in, say, 1998 (when the debate was Friends or Seinfeld), or 1987. How alien would it have seemed?
