tv: bored to death

HBO is really taking care of me. There is an empty hole in my DVR now that the phenomenally trashy second season of True Blood is over, but at least I have Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series (the show is based on it!) to tide me over. More importantly, HBO is filling the True Blood time slot with a new premiere: Bored to Death is a half hour comedy series about a neurotic New Yorker who decides to become an old school-style private eye, emulating Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The series is based on a short story by the literary world’s favorite neurotic New Yorker, Jonathan Ames. You can hear him read the story here, on a compilation that McSweeney’s put together exclusively for eMusic.

In the TV show, the Ames character is played by the marvelous Jason Schwartzman, and his sidekick is played by Zach Galifianakis. Can’t get much more quirkily lovable than that, can you? Well, actually, maybe you can–and in real life! This past weekend at the Brooklyn Book Festival, Ames did an incredibly charismatic reading. When he’d finished, he was asked to do something on stage that he’d never done before. So he called up fellow reader, David Cross, Mr. Tobias Funke himself, to assist him. Ames pulled down his pants, revealing a pair of bright pink boxers, and positioned himself over Cross’s knee. And then the crowd of hundreds of book lovers sitting on the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall got to see David Cross spank Jonathan Ames with a paddle. “What’s so cute about that?” you might ask. Well, the best part was the reaction from Mr. Ames’s girlfriend, Fiona Apple. She giggled and cheered and hooted with the rest of us. It might not have been TV-worthy, but the moment was as surreal and weird and funny as many an HBO show.