Entourage, Season 5: The Decline and Fall of Vincent Chase

“They made me feel like a piece of meat sitting with a big star,” Irina Voronina said of her time with the “Entourage” cast as a guest star. Maybe this show is more realistic than I realized.

Season 5 of “Entourage” opens with a bearded and broke Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) relaxing on a beach in Mexico. “Medellin,” the indie movie about Pablo Escobar he risked everything for, failed to find a distributor and embarrassed him at Cannes. The outlook for his career is bleaker than ever.

Somewhere along the way, though, “Entourage” stopped being solely about Vince’s successes and failures as an actor. So while Vinny sulks in the sand, Eric (Kevin Connolly) and Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) are back in LA working. Ari (Jeremy Piven) faces another major career choice this year, and even Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) witnesses some major events with the potential for real character development going forward.

That said, the 5th installment takes some time to really get going. Early episodes seem to have slightly more gimmick-y elements (like Turtle working as Drama’s assistant for one day), and the fireworks don’t really blow until the last 4 or 5 shows of the year. (The notable exception is the mushroom episode, which, despite being one of the clearest gimmicks all year, made me laugh.) The last half of the year may be the strongest stretch in the history of the series as Vince’s quest for a comeback takes some odd turns.

The cast is the same as always. As usual, Ari and Drama provide most of the laughs. (We picked Kevin Dillon to win the Emmy. If he does, it’d make it 4 in a row for “Entourage” in the supporting category as Piven has landed the last 3 in a row.) I’ve found Connolly annoying in the past, but at this point, I think he makes a decent straight man for the group. Grenier was too sunny to pull off the doom and gloom at the beginning of the season. He showed enough fire down the stretch, though, to even things out.

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