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Created by Doug Ellin
Rating: 5.3 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
At the start of the fifth season of this HBO boys' club series, we find the gang more than a little out of sorts. Following the previous season's epic debacle at Cannes, in which pretty boy actor Vince (Adrian Grenier) and his manager/producer friend Eric (Kevin Connolly) finally hit the critical and financial wall with a (reportedly) putrid film on the life of Pablo Escobar, everyone has seemingly gone their separate ways. Vince, as is his wont, is off in Mexico, hiding out and drowning his sorrows with beach bunnies and tequila, along with Turtle (Jerry Ferrara); while his brother Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) continues to work on his TV show back in L.A. and Eric finally begins to focus on some of his other clients. In the course of the season, the boys all reunite (inevitably), hook up with babes left and right and actually hit a few low points before seeming to right the ship. The principle conceit of the show is that it represents a kind of male fantasy land, where you get to hang with your best buds and let the good times roll indefinitely on someone else's tab. Conversely, the only thing making it the least bit worth watching has been the anticipation of the inescapable come-down when the collective bills finally came due. As such, for seasoned watchers of the show, this is the meager pay off: Vince struggles with his fading career, gets cast in a serious indie film about firefighters and gets, well, fired -- but not until the director, an intense German auteur named Verner (Stellan Skarsgård) finally calls Vince out for his single most screamingly obvious flaw: He. Can't. Act. Vince, in an (all too) brief moment of real despair, heads home to Queens -- all his friends in tow -- to try and pick up the pieces of his life. For a quick, shining moment, it seems as if the show could actually veer away from fantasy land and into another direction altogether, forcing its main protagonist to finally suffer for his art. But, alas, at the moment of his lowest ebb, fate again intervenes to offer him a shining beacon of hope. That the show has now at least tried to present Vince as a fallible character -- and an extended hypocrite, for after swearing for five seasons he could leave all the glitter and glitz of L.A. behind forever and return home without a second thought, he is plainly terrified of that very prospect -- works very much in its favor, but the preposterous bail-out they afford Vince in the closing minutes of the season works to undo much of the keen emotional insight the producers had worked so hard to instill.
This multi-disc release includes behind-the-scenes interviews and several cast and production commentaries.
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