There’s a certain style of commercial that’s cropped up in recent years that’s essentially a parasite sucking up existing goodwill, piggybacking on our collective love for some celebrated pop culture brand in order to sell us more beautiful, life-sustaining Products. You know the ones: Some beer company hires Jeff Bridges to put on a cardigan and sound stoned, then bills it as a “return” of Jeff Lebowski—cheerfully ignoring that The Dude was created by a lot more than just an actor and a pair of sunglasses. But if you think you’re annoyed by this kind of mercenary cultural necromancy, we assure you that you’ve got nothing on the ire that Entourage creator Doug Ellin has brought to bear on that new commercial dragging the good name of Entourage through the mud.
As we reported earlier this week, the recent ad was, of course, for a sports gambling site (in this case, the irritatingly named, irritatingly Jake Paul-backed Betr), and features Entourage stars Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier playing “themselves” in ways that sure seem to be based in the ways they acted, in-character, across eight seasons and a movie of Entourage. Also, it’s absolutely goddamn terrible: We cannot really put into words how unpleasant it is to watch a 61-year-old Piven try resurrect his version of fast-talking cool in the face of Jake Paul mumblemouthing about sports gambling. (We’re not going to link it again here, in fact, because it really sucks. Seek it out yourself if you’re craving the psychic damage that badly.)
But even our frustration at Piven’s Jersey Shore-referencing tough guy antics can’t measure up to Ellin’s anger, expressed in a video posted on Instagram on Wednesday. “It makes me puke,” Ellin said of the ad, noting that he’s been inundated with questions about whether he was involved in its creation. Acknowledging that not everybody loved Entourage (even if he personally still thinks they’re extremely wrong), Ellin nevertheless went to bat for his writers, saying of the commercial that, “I watch it and I want to throw up, because I would suffer, along with many other people, over every syllable, every fucking word” of the original show. He sounds especially pissed off at Piven, who he says he had to beg to do the show in the first place, and then “He didn’t wanna talk about it afterwards. Like, he wanted to get away from it, because he had so much better shit going on. But now he’s back on it, because he’s getting paid.”
Ellin claims he has “no bitterness” toward his former stars, though. (And who are we to say that he’s lying?) “I want everyone to get paid, get rich. Just fucking do your own shit. That’s all.” Meanwhile, a statement from Betr responding to Ellin’s obvious displeasure—he made another post on social media on Wednesday calling the commercial “trash and theft”—obnoxiously thanked him for “helping promote” the ad, in part of what we can only assume is a bizarre cultural experiment to see how sympathetic Entourage creator Doug Ellin can be made to seem in 2026.
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