It’s a sad time to be a Bored to Death fan. Just as the show continues to improve each year, with short, and what I would guess, but don’t know to be, relatively inexpensive seasons, it still received its walking papers from HBO in a general comedy layoff, with How to Make It In America and Hung also sent to their graves. With Entourage over, and Curb Your Enthusiasm possibly over (which it has been after each of the last three or so seasons), only Enlightened will be back of the existing HBO half hour programs. Bored to Death, at this point in time was the best of these shows and season three was the best season yet of Bored to Death.
As always, the strength of the show was with the wonderful, zany, interplay between the three main characters and friends Jonathan, Ray, and George, played by Jason Schwartzman, Zach Galifianakis, and Ted Danson respectively. Favorite recurring characters, such as Jonathan’s arch-rival Lewis played by John Hodgman, and George’s arch-rival Richard (played by Oliver Platt) returned. The familiar New York, and Brooklyn in particular, setting returned as well, with the carousel in Prospect Park hosting a major scene. New was George’s artisanal restaurant which bans cellular phones; instead, for emergencies, old-fashioned land lines are connected. In this latest season, the show got weird, there can be no denying that. Well, that’s wrong actually. The show got weirder. The seeds for strangeness were planted previously, but this season outdid all previously weirdness with elder love and incest becoming major plot points, obscuring furries and George’s daughter marrying a man George’s age.
The show grew stronger when it realized that it didn’t need to have a central mystery for Jonathan to solve every episode. Not that those mysteries were bad by any means, as some of the best moments in the show happened during those mysteries, but the show was at its finest when it could feel free to swing from a mystery to a George singing lesson to a Super Ray signing to a Jonathan night out with George’s alcoholic daughter. The humor was often absurd, but Bored to Death turned from a show I smiled along with in the first season to one I laughed out loud at several times an episode in the third. The show kept its film noir trappings throughout, and used them well without feeling hemmed in by them. The cast all had great comic timing and the look of the show complimented the absurd situations.
Mostly though, it was a treat every week to spend time with the characters. Television is populated with shows about friends but few are such unabashed paeans to friendship as Bored to Death, and few feature characters I’d like to hang out with at a bar and have a beer with, or in Jonathan’s case, a glass of white wine with, as much as these three. The friendship was never better framed than in the fifth episode of the third season when Jonathan and George attend a counseling sessions to repair their relationship. Both parties air their grievances, and after George is still frustrated, Jonathan decides the best way to get back in George’s good graces is to help take down George’s rival’s restaurant. Though a series of zany adventures, he figures out the fraudulent practices of the restaurant and exposes it, which finally mends the rift between Jonathan and George, actions speaking louder than words. I’m glad I at least have 24 episodes to relive the good times over and over.
Television, the Drug of the Nation 