‘Entourage’ is as deep as shallow can be

“Entourage” is the breeziest and most watchable of the HBO half-hours set inside the belly of Hollywood, chipper about life where “The Comeback” is a bummer, and much less egocentric than “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

But some 20 episodes into a show about a budding movie star and his misfit posse from the old neighborhood in Queens (a riff, apparently, on executive producer Mark Wahlberg’s working-class-Boston-to-Hollywood bildungsroman), I’m still waiting for the series to become full-blooded. Instead, it seems stuck -- content to be merely an entertaining pass at young Hollywood, its A-rooms, its daily rhythms (wake up ... what time is it ... what day is it ... lunch....) and blithe spending and sponging habits, with in-jokes about midweek traffic on Pacific Coast Highway and the kind of L.A. house a million dollars buys you (a fixer-upper Craftsman in “an up-and-coming neighborhood”).

All of that is there in spades. Oddly, “Entourage” pays copious attention to getting right the physical environment of Los Angeles (or at least a subset of the city), making the show one of the few series on TV that’s not only set here but feels like it, palpably. But this commitment to place, to localizing the jokes even if some out-of-town viewers might not get them (references to such places as Tom Bergen’s, or getting bagels on Fairfax) only makes it a show by half.

Because nothing is at stake, finally, on the series, nothing beyond seeing what’s beyond the next velvet rope or hearing the next cleverly uttered industry dig. In this way, watching “Entourage” has come to mirror the pleasurably empty experience of reading, say, a Details magazine profile of Matthew McConaughey. On the one hand, who doesn’t check out the occasional McConaughey profile? You know nothing bad’s going to happen, no disturbing plot twists, and meanwhile you’ll get some pleasant tinge of inside detail -- where a young movie star has breakfast, what he eats, the just-this-side-of-outlandish things he says about other movie stars.

And so it goes on “Entourage,” where in a recent episode the deal for movie star Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) to star as the underwater superhero Aquaman went missing, sending his shark agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) on a rampage. Meanwhile, Vince’s best friend and manager, Eric (Kevin Connolly), is fretting because funds are running low after Vince made the low-budget indie feature “Queens Boulevard” over the summer, and now Vince has plunked down $5 million on a Spanish estate once owned by Marlon Brando.

“You realize that Vince just bought a house for $5 million,” Eric tells Ari.

“Was I the one who told you guys to do a 10-day escrow?” Ari shoots back.

It’s a good exchange in the service of not much beyond the sense, vaguely titillating, of being in on an actor’s profligate spending. On “Entourage” the toys mount by the week, the plasma screens go from 50 inches to 70, the model-starlet-wannabes show up and disrobe and rarely mouth a word, and Vince’s publicist, Shauna (Debi Mazar), cracks wise on cue.

Sunday night she begged out of aquarium shopping with the boys because, she said, she had to go pull Russell Crowe out of Tom Bergen’s before his Leno appearance. On “Entourage” they don’t swim with the sharks, they buy them. Will it all go away? Maybe, maybe not, but Vince has already said he’s fine with that; worst-case scenario: He makes a string of flops and has to go back to Queens, an eventuality he has already said he can live with.

“Sometimes your position in life allows you to get things you never could have had,” he tells Eric. “That doesn’t mean it’s not right. And it doesn’t mean it’s going to last.”

They are sitting by a pool, and Vince is trying to relieve Eric’s mild turmoil about a busted relationship and a one-night stand with a model from Perfect 10 magazine. It is Eric, nicknamed “E,” who is the show’s protagonist, its engine of angst. What does he want? To keep Vince’s career on the rise, to keep the velvet ropes parting and, by doing so, to prove himself as a neophyte talent manager. It isn’t a bad premise, to focus a series on a hanger-on, but it’s hard to care about Eric when his goal in life is gradually being revealed as nothing more dramatically interesting than to keep the gravy trains running on time.

It’s “Sex and the City” but with four versions of Samantha. There’s a conflict there -- can E juggle Ari’s abuse, Vince’s immature needs and his own insecurities? -- but the show, and Vince’s even-keeled personality, keep him well-protected from anything too dark. Eric himself betrays only mild irritation or bemusement as he navigates this strange new world on his cellphone.

“Entourage” could have been a deeper show had it been about Vince, about a young actor’s struggles and paranoia and mixed feelings about the intimates leeching off him -- E, Vince’s brother Johnny “Drama” (Kevin Dillon, the show’s ace in the hole and only nod at desperation) and his other friend, the pothead gofer Turtle (Jerry Ferrara). Although “Entourage” gives us a window into a new, much-less-rarefied era of Hollywood youth -- the brave new world of celebrity life that we read about in Star and Us magazines and on the website Defamer.com -- the show doesn’t use the milieu to make any larger comment.

Perhaps that’s its point of view: that Hollywood’s all good when you’ve come from a real place like Queens, nothing but low-hanging fruit and the freedom -- maybe tenuous, who knows, whatever -- to work it and enjoy. It’s a show about new money in Hollywood in the way that “The Sopranos” updates the mob boss as a nouveau riche social climber (big house in the suburbs, kid at Columbia). Except that Tony Soprano is balanced, precariously, between worlds; these boys are just sending a postcard home.