Entourage aired one of its better episodes of the season. I know it's not the best-liked show at Screen Jam (which I can understand; it's far from a great program), but the humor was working tonight. I think the writers pushed the characters to silly one-dimensional extremes at times this season, but have toned it down and the show got better as a result.

I'm not going to comment on Sopranos yet.

This may be one of those things where, being poor, I don't know anything about it, but, what kind of a checking account has thirty million dollars in it? Isn't that just insane? Even interest bearing checking accounts don't return that much, do they? And FDIC insurance only covers the first hundred thousand. . . So, I don't get that.

I think that people with extreme levels of wealth are customers at specialized banks, or have special services available to them at the usual major retail banks. If you have 30, 50, or 200 million dollars, a bank will do whatever you want, possibly even buying their own private deposit insurance to cover your account.

Also, I can't imagine how a 6-month film shoot can be done for $30M. Even if Vince Chase (whose acting is atrocious) and some producers don't take a salary, the cost of insuring the shoot, renting equipment, paying crew, editing, catering, location fees, set construction, and a hundred other expenses won't leave anything left for marketing, which might be the most important expense anyway. If the producers of Medellin want to get the film to market, they're going to have to bring on additional investors or make a cash call to Adam Goldberg, who's already in for $30M. Either way, their equity interest is diluted.

Knocked Up was made for about $30M, from what I've read, and most of that was shot on sets in LA with two or three days' worth of shooting in Las Vegas. It's ultimately a point-and-shoot relationship comedy without a lot of complicated takes. I suspect a Pablo Escobar Biopic will be a little more ambitious technically.

It's probably equally silly of me to dissect a fictional movie production on a show that already asks us to suspend disbelief at times. Like, when Kevin Connolly dates Emanuelle Chiqri.

I am not liking this season of Entourage at all. The humor seems to be set aside for the evolution of the characters and the story. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but I pretty much never cared about most of the characters and just watched the show for the humor.

I can't believe we have reached the end of the Sopranos. It has been a long glorious journey.

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Theoretically, none of that $30 million would need to go to marketing. Traditionally, marketing costs are handled by a film's distributor, not its producers. So I guess the idea would be to make the actual film for $30 million (not all that far-fetched, assuming that VC has agreed to appear for scale), and then auction it off to distributors once completed.

That being said, what I'm not buying is the idea that neither Ari nor E would have attempted to raise foreign money for production, by pre-selling the film (which, lest we forget, stars someone whose last movie broke box-office records) in various international territories. That would be step one.

It sounds like quibbling, I know. But one of "Entourage's" calling cards has been its supposed realism, its insider's look into Hollywood. And, a lot of the time, it is pretty believable, if exaggerated. That, to me, makes an episode like tonight's feel strange.

"Soprano's" was pretty good, though, wasn't it?

I was upset that the Goldberg character didn't play a bigger role. The earlier episode with him was one of the funniest episodes ever. Ari's Phil Mickelson line was great, as was any related to the Yom Kippur.

The Sopranos was OK. It moved slowly at the beginning, but accelerated nicely. Still not sure how they will wrap it up.