Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Pop Elegantiarum.
Really any television show that included this exchange, delivered by these people, would have made me happy:
Ted Danson: "Because I'm bored. God, I'm bored...Everyone has bad wine breath tonight. It's like Chernobyl."
But everything else about Bored to Death, for which I had extremely high hopes, and which had its premiere on Sunday, made me very happy too. The show is pleasantly low-key, for a project that's airing on HBO, and has a cast with resumes that range from snarky to twee. The show is funny, and is sarcastic. A montage in which Schwartzman sits in a cheap hotel lobby and watches various hookers and their clients check in and out, and another scene in which he's menaced by a thug in a leather jacket and tighty-whities brandishing a grill lighter have an air of Wes Anderson gone seedy. But even with those touches of affect, the show has an air of crazed plausibility about it. Advertising yourself as a private detective is the kind of thing that really bored, artistic people might dream up, and what makes it a television show is that the characters actually go through with it.
And if the concept's good, the casting is even better. Danson as a publishing executive wedging himself into a toilet stall so he can smoke, Olivia Thirlby actually getting to be a grown-up, Zach Galifianakis as a depressed webcartoonist, and that's just in the first episode? We get Oliver Platt, people! We get Patton Oswalt! None of the actors look like they're trying too hard, and it helps that they aren't given absolutely insane dialogue to wrap their mouths around. The pitch is good. And the first episode is available for free on iTunes. It's well worth checking out, especially as the fall television season gets into full swing, and the networks are trying like crazy to impress viewers. It's nice to watch something laid back and a little off kilter.