Bored to Death is back on Sky Atlantic, after a long wait for UK viewers, for its third and final season. Blocked Brooklyn writer Jonathan Ames (the fictional one, played by Jason Schwartzman, not the real one who writes the series, and who is not Jonathan Safran Foer or Jonathan Lethem or Jonathan Franzen, who are completely different doyens of the New York literary scene) has at last published his second book. He is still working as a woefully incompetent private eye and Ted Danson is still having the time of his life as Ames’s playboy-pothead erstwhile employer George, who is now a restaurant owner and trying to rebuild his relationship with his daughter. Ames’s cartoonist friend Ray (Zach Galifianakis) now has access to the son created by a lesbian couple and his stolen sperm, and is largely content. “I feel needed. It’s like being with Jonathan, but better.”
In the opening episode, George’s daughter reveals she has a boyfriend – and soon to be fiance – her father’s age; Jonathan’s parents reveal that he, too, is the product of an (official) sperm donation (“The donor was Jewish and very bright, just like we asked for!” says his indefatigable mother. “He was a member of Menscha!”); and Jonathan is framed for murder and ends up hanging from the clockface outside his apartment building.
It sounds like a lot, but until I wrote it down I didn’t realise anything much had happened. It’s such a strange, affectless, self-absorbed little thing, meticulous in everything it does but so neurotically inward-looking that the title eternally threatens to become some kind of po-mo meta in-joke causing a hipster event horizon halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge.
And yet laughs – wry, mirthless, but laughs nevertheless – are periodically jolted from you when you least expect them, just like they were in Rushmore, the film that put Schwartzman on the map. Danson is a genius and so is Galifianakis, of another, shuffling, understated kind.
It’s a slower burn than one of Ray’s spliffs but it’s worth it. I think. I think.
