I used to think that Tom Selleck had the best life of all male actors of a certain age. Swans about in Hawaii as Magnum PI for a decade, has a little rest then reappears on Friends and detonates a nostalgia lovebomb among the next generation. And now he is winding down gently in the perfectly reasonable Rookie Blues with a fatherly role perfectly suited his respected-elder-statesman position in televisual history. Nice.
But now it is possible that Ted Danson has him beat. A decade of Cheers and entry into comedy legend was followed by reinvention as a serious actor in Damages and now he can afford to pick and choose between the two. The comedy chops are now getting a run out in Sky Atlantic's hipster sitcom Bored to Death.
The series was created by Brooklyn novelist Jonathan Ames and centres around a character called Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman) who is a Brooklyn novelist – no, wait, come back, it's really not that bad – his cartoonist friend Ray (Zach Galifianakis) and his magazine editor boss, George (Danson). Abandoned by his girlfriend, stuck on his second novel and reading Farewell My Lovely for comfort, Ames (or "Ames", but let's not go there) posts an ad on Craigslist and reinvents himself as a private detective.
The pilot episode is not great. It's beautifully shot, high-end and low-end New York mores and environs are caught exactly and the two leads and Galifianakis are at the top of their games, but the whole thing remains inert and, even allowing for the neurotic self-absorption of the protagonist and the slice of boho NYC life it primarily depicts, just too affectless for its own good. The title threatens to become some kind of po-mo-meta-in-joke (or "joke"' but let's not . . .).
Fortunately things pick up once the series proper gets going. Danson has the time of his life as egocentric man-child George and you find yourself having a Rushmore reaction. You can't quite spot the jokes and yet laughs are periodically jolted from a weirdly hidden place within you. It's unsettling, but I like it.
