Out on a whim as a way of life

HBO’s new eight-week series, “Entourage,” concerns contemporary young Hollywood, a subject of small interest to this writer, who gets all the contemporary young Hollywood he needs at his local Starbucks. I do not doubt, however, that many have a keen interest in the milieu, which “Entourage” will amply satisfy.

Executive-produced by Mark Wahlberg and based loosely on some of his own associates, it is not exactly the network’s latest attempt at a male “Sex and the City” (mayhap you remember “The Mind of the Married Man”), but it does feature four best friends who think and talk a lot about sex and a little (a very little, in this case, and then derisively) about love. Three of them are dimwits, if likable dimwits, and the ostensibly smart one is at least enough of a dimwit that he spends all of his time with dimwits. Their desires are not complicated: They like pretty, expensive things; easy access to restricted places; and having sex.

First among them is Vince (Adrian Grenier), a rising young movie star -- the New York Times calls him the new Johnny Depp, but he’s more of a Joey Lawrence -- and if he is not particularly bright, neither is he nasty. His face is his fortune, and he’s fine with that. He can’t be bothered to read scripts, or to make any decision more complicated than whether to go off with the latest good-looking girl to say hello, and since the answer to that question is always “yes,” life is simple.

Vince has put his affairs into the untrained hands of high-school friend Eric (Kevin Connolly), who is the smart, sensitive one among them, and therefore the closest thing the show has to a protagonist. Johnny “Drama” is Vince’s less successful, less good-looking actor brother, played by a cleverly cast Kevin Dillon (the real-life etc. etc. of Matt), obsessed with grooming and fitness. Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) is short and round, in the traditional manner of the comical flunky -- in Hollywood, and in Hollywood movies, physique equals character -- whose lot it is to fetch and roll over and steal scraps from the table.

They come from Queens, and live together in a mansion in the hills, in parasitical symbiosis not unmixed with actual camaraderie, which in the New York manner expresses itself as obscene invective. Eric lives in the guesthouse, actually, which lets us know that he is in their world, but not of it, just as we are given to understand that he is down-to-earth because he knows the names of the Mexican help. And unlike his friends, he has had an actual girlfriend (Monica Keena) and a broken heart.

The show features so many Hollywood and West Hollywood locations it might have been underwritten by their chambers of commerce -- Fred Segal, the Hollywood Hills Coffee Shop (as famously seen, with different decor, in “Swingers,” something of an inspiration to “Entourage”), the ArcLight, Lucky Strike Lanes, club-of-the-moment Prey. The filmmakers do very well re-creating the noisy human swarm of premieres and parties; the cameo presences of Jimmy Kimmel, Jessica Alba, Luke Wilson, Sarah Silverman and others add a shimmer of veracity.

I don’t doubt that characters like these are out there, riding in Humvees and limos through the streets of our town, and up to business far worse than anything this fairly tame crew of pot-smoking, golf-playing, partygoing skirt chasers gets up to. (And heaven knows there are people in the world whose ambition is nothing more than to pick up the leavings of their more fortunate fellows.)

And I suppose there are women in the world as empty as the instantly beddable Maxim babes the producers habitually drape around their boys, but it would help to give them even something stupid to say -- it strikes a wrong note, this neo-retro sexism, even if it accurately reflects the world view of the characters or, indeed, their actual world. It’s a failing that even the presence of Debi Mazar (great, as always) as Vince’s publicist and the intriguing Samaire Armstrong (from “The O.C.”) as Eric’s budding love interest does not redeem.

HBO exec Carolyn Strauss has described “Entourage” as “a hilarious romp,” a term last heard at the premiere of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” But apart from Dillon, who is consistently amusing in his desperate vanity, and the aggressive babble of Jeremy Piven as Vince’s high-powered slime-bucket agent, Ari (named for Wahlberg’s real agent), the show isn’t even particularly funny.

And despite the abundant partying and prank playing, it feels oddly static, less a narrative than a dramatized travelogue. These boys suffer from a severe lack of crises. The only moments of real tension in the four episodes available for review -- half the series -- involve Eric’s evolving love life and his prickly relationship with Ari. Piven, as the only grown-up actor with much screen time, is the dominant force here, and his scenes with Connolly are the best in show.

And yet “Entourage” looks great, and for the most part feels real. The show is not as smart as it should be, but it is smart. And because it is so well made and acted, and so often rings true -- not to Hollywood particularly but to the myriad small tics of humankind -- it is very easy to sink into and stay with. A stressless place to kill time.

*

Entourage

Where: HBO

When: Premieres 10-10:30 p.m. Sunday

Rating: The network has rated the show TV-MA (may not be suitable for children under the age of 17).

Adrian Grenier...Vince Chase

Kevin Connolly...Eric

Jeremy Piven...Ari Gold

Kevin Dillon...Drama

Jerry Ferrara...Turtle

Creator, Doug Ellin. Executive producers, Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson, Ellin and Larry Charles. Director (Sunday’s pilot), David Frankel. Writers, Ellin, Steve Tompkins.