Dear HBO's Entourage, Please Get Better: 2.12

There's nary a show on television that disappoints me as consistently as HBO's Entourage. Yet I seem to continue to watch.

The reason is pretty obvious: Jeremy Piven as Ari Gold.

It's hard to remember my exact favorite Jeremy Piven moment from Entourage, but he is the only thing that makes the show worth watching. Seriously. [Debi Mazar is good, but she's barely in it.] Can we kill off 'Drama' and replace him with someone who doesn't frequently spoil scenes? I know, it's a cool in-joke and whatever to have Kevin Dillon, but seriously, there's a reason the guy wasn't famous before. And bring back Samaire Armstrong, she was an awesome assistant-- the new gaysian guy is just an excuse for gay jokes, not a character.

Oh, and better writing would be nice for your show. Boy do you guys need better writing.

I think Entourage and HBO's recent crop of disappointing Hollywood-oriented shows [I can't even watch more than five minutes of "The Comeback"] leaves the door wide open to Showtime. Why not a gay version of Entourage, where the 'star' character is closeted and publicly straight and his 'Entourage' as it were is a creepy legion of Scientologists?

But here's the thing-- good shows die in their pilot versions every year, dozens if not hundreds. Some are quite good, some, not so much. This is a blog by a guy who created one such dead pilot, called 'Global Frequency'. You can find a link to the evil, evil pirate torrent of the show the WB essentially threw away here.

This show is friggin' cool, though be prepared to hate the WB with a passion you might normally reserve for Fox for not picking up this gem of a show. The best [worst?] thing about the Global Frequency pilot is that it seems like the show would've been even better than the pilot, considering how well they set up the characters, situations and world of the show. It wouldn't be like ABC's disappointing "Eyes", which had a great pilot but a crappy set of episodes. "Global Frequency" has a great set-up that allows globe-trotting, an ever-expanding stream of characters, and a strong sense of purpose. To wit, it's that normal people can work together outside the system to make things happen. Which is why it'd be the ideal show for a Net buzz-induced pick-up.

As you may know, Assistant Atlas swims against the Hollywood intellectual current when it comes to piracy. I think a little piracy ain't such a bad thing-- we all know that it bolsters creativity from Chinese subtitle writers. Or just ask the kids who were in college when Napster exploded if they can even stand to listen to commercial radio at this point. Eck, no way. Why? Because their taste has involved. And it looks like television might just be the next area revolutionized by the Internet. If a leaked pilot generates enough Internet buzz that a network orders episodes, the movement will have succeeded.

Of course, for that to happen, a lot more people need to see the pilot-- which is why I'm using our super-fast Internet connection and my roomie's G5 to make that happen. Ah, the pleasures of seeding torrents. It's right up there with sowing wild oats-- only it's even sexier 'cause it's kinda illegal.