Bored to Death deserves to be in TV’s hall of fame

Humphrey Bogart wasn’t a tall man but he embodied a kind of tough-guy masculinity. There was a growly edge to his voice, a world-weary cynicism and the confidence to take up space.

As Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Bogart was what you expected of a private dick.

Bored to Death’s Jonathan Ames? Not so much. Jonathan (Jason Schwartzman) is decidedly soft-boiled, a slightly bumbling, introspective and loquacious writer who would be a marijuana-addled fantasist if he didn’t actually have surprising follow-through.

He decides to become an unlicensed private detective after picking up Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely in the throes of a break-up after his girlfriend left him for smoking too much pot and drinking too much white wine.

The cases are low-stakes and he loses more money than he makes on them - a missing sister, a stolen skateboard, dognapping and getting a tape from small-time blackmailers.

In a meeting with a potential client, the man says to Jonathan, “You’re not what I was expecting for a dick, I was expecting a piece of beef, shoulders”. Jonathan, in his checked sports coat and thin tie, replies, “If you don’t like my dimensions, I thank you for the whisky and I’ll be on my way”.

He’s polite because Jonathan is nothing if not unerringly polite. He has no aggression or entitlement. Even when he’s sprinting through New York City in a gimp suit, being thrown out of a Russian club or taking punches from kidnappers, he always remembers his please and thank yous.

Jonathan would be a gentleman spy if he was better at his side hustle. At one point, his parents have to bail him out. When his father tells him to stop apologising to people, Jonathan immediately says sorry to his dad. It’s adorable.

Jonathan is named after the man who created him, writer Jonathan Ames, first in a short story which Ames then adapted for the screen across three seasons of TV starring, in addition to Schwartzman, Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis.

So, yes, if you’ve already binged Netflix’s new series A Man on the Inside this past weekend, with Danson as a septuagenarian undercover private detective, he had already flirted with the genre in Bored to Death.

Except here, he played Jonathan’s friend and boss, George Christopher, an editor of a high-end men’s magazine who wears dapper suits and loves to get high.

He also has a child-like giddiness following Jonathan on his cases, he finds the antics far more interesting than posh cocktail parties with the same high society set. Even though George is a privileged, wealthy, old white man who has to ask, “What’s a Subaru?”, the way he’s played by Danson makes him impossible to hate.

Maybe it’s also because beneath his somewhat ridiculous veneer is a man who is just trying to have fun, matter and be remembered. When he receives some bad news, George says, “I can’t die, I haven’t figured anything out yet”. Ooph. The resonance.

Galifianakis plays Ray, Jonathan’s best friend who draws a comic book featuring his own alter ego, a character that is imbued with super powers when his penis hits the third rail in the New York subway. Ray is a sweet manchild who was once hustled out of his semen by a lesbian couple.

The HBO comedy ran from 2009 to 2011, and made New York’s Brooklyn with its food co-ops and the conflict between artists, hipsters and gentrification, seems like the place to be before Lena Dunham’s Girls came along in 2012.

One character says Park Slope is to lesbians what San Francisco is to gay men – although that comparison has a nostalgic tint to it.

Bored to Death is beloved by those who remember it well but was never quite included in the pantheon of 2000s TV greats, largely because it came out just before streaming took over the cultural zeitgeist and bombarded audiences with far too many releases to contend with let alone remember.

But this series deserves its place in the hall of fame. It’s witty and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny - the sight of Danson trying to blow out the soap foam from a plastic pee sample jar is never not hilarious, how did soap get into the jar you ask, that answer is in season two, episode four.

In interviews, Ames brings up the likes of P.G. Wodehouse, Abbott and Costello, Dashiell Hammett, Casablanca and Mel Brooks, and there is a strong argument that Bored to Death is a convergence of all those influences. It’s smooth and weird at the same time, super likeable and very droll.

It was a moment when hipster-ish, indie pop culture hero-ed quirky characters and stories, but still knew how to laugh with them. This was the era between Charlie Kaufman and Portlandia. Schwartzman sang the show’s theme song as his musical solo project, Coconut Records.

It was a particular slice of life, one that was, admittedly, white and generally middle-class, and Bored to Death’s collection of guest stars included the likes of Jim Jarmusch (as himself, cycling in a circle in a room), Kevin Bacon (also as himself), Jenny Slate, Parker Posey, Kristin Wiig, Oliver Platt, Zoe Kazan, Bebe Neuwirth, John Hodgman and Patton Oswalt.

At the core of it is this friendship between three mild-mannered men who are each other’s hype squad getting up to some silly private detective shenanigans. What’s not to love?

Bored to Death is streaming on Binge