What is it about Entourage that I like so much? I mean, I’m an enlightened kind of guy, a veritable SNAG (sensitive new age guy), so what do I find so exhilarating about watching some Beverly-hills Neanderthals talking about screwing and pursuing and otherwise-objectifying the fairer sex? And I do mean talk about it, because that’s mostly all they ever do. And if they’re not talking about it, they’re looking for a place to talk about it, or looking for some friends to talk about it with . . .

I give my wife credit – she tried to watch it, she really did, but she just couldn’t get past the sheer testosterone-ness (or is that testostericity?) of it all. She just couldn’t feel the same delight as I apparently can watching well-heeled Angelenos behaving very badly.

So is that all there is to it? Is it just some kind of vicarious wish-fulfillment, where we decidedly boring, middle-aged, henpecked males live out our fantasies through Vince and his decidedly extraordinary buddies? Maybe it’s the Lifestyles-of-the-Rich-and-Famous effect, that feeling that we are peering into a forbidden world, a world of agents and cocktails and beautiful people that mere mortals can only dream about. Maybe it’s the feeling that we’re insiders, that we’ve somehow become complicit, if only for the half hour it’s on every week.

Of course, this is all a load of crap — the world of Vince and E and Drama and Turtle is no more real than that of Dorothy or the Tin Man or the yellow-brick road. Its producers carefully cultivate the impression of verisimilitude, all hand-held cameras and hip angles, imitating the grammar of indie cinema, or maybe simply MTV. They carefully nourish the illusion that we’re right there hanging with the homes, smoking dope, reading scripts, and chasing skirt right along with them, and that that’s the way it really is, just like we’ve always imagined it to be. And I for one eat it up.