Jason Schwartzman Talks about the "Bored to Death" Season 4 That Never Was

[JamesG]

An Interview with Jason Schwartzman
The actor speaks with THR about the Season Four of "Bored to Death" that never was.

6/12/2012
by Jordan Zakarin


For the past three years, Schwartzman starred as a very amateur private detective in HBO’s comedy "Bored to Death", a modern twist on Chandler-style noir novels written and produced by the Brooklyn-based author Jonathan Ames.

Schwartzman blurred the personal and professional, and in more ways than one; his character was a Brooklyn-based author named Jonathan Ames. He wasn’t really playing an autobiographical stand-in for the real-life Ames so much as twisted character that began with a kernel of Ames’ self-perception.

(think of the recent Woody Allen substitutes, such as Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris)





Schwartzman-as-Ames traveled around Brooklyn and Manhattan, taking and often haphazardly solving small domestic mysteries solicited over craigslist. He was joined by his depressed and domesticated cartoonist buddy Ray (Zach Galifianakis) and stoner-magazine editor mentor George (Ted Danson) in adventures that saw him channel a similar earnest curiosity as roles such as Rushmore.

Whereas he was starting clubs and writing plays in the early Anderson feature, Schwartzman’s Ames would stop dead in his tracks during action scenes to inquire about curiosities that caught his interest as he was being chased by mad men with guns or caught in full leather bondage body suits.





The show was canceled after its third season last fall, which ended the series in the awkward place of his character having just found the sperm donor from which he came -- and learning that he was dating a woman who came from the same prolific, charitable masterbator.

Taking it a step further, when offered the chance to reveal to his new beau their unfortunate relation, he declined, promising potential further once-removed incest.

“I’m down with it, because I feel like that is very true to the show, you know what I mean?” he says of the ending.

“That’s true to the themes of the show, just this idea that someone who is trying to do the right thing and doesn’t want to hurt people’s feelings, and then by trying not to hurt the person’s feelings, you sort of do maybe not the correct thing in the moment. And that is really a thematic thing of the show, is trying to not hurt people and trying to do right, and then in the process of trying to do right, you mess things up a little bit.”





As is often the case in the precarious world of television renewals, there exists a fully written fourth season that never got made.

“What was great about the show was that, the first season, it was sort of like this guy that was getting over this girl, becomes a detective, but to me it didn’t lock into that as a thing,” he offers.

“The first season, each episode is the ‘case of this, the case of that,’ and if you look at the third season, there’s one case. So I sort of think it evolved and kept getting more and more intense, and the fourth season, from everything I knew, was the most almost cinematic one, it was the least like a TV show in that really was much more sprawling and intricate.”





He demurs from revealing more -- he has too much respect for Ames, with whom he became close friends during the show’s run. The author even became ordained so that he could marry the actor and his wife, Brady Cunningham. That relationship was one of the silver linings that came with the show’s cancellation.

Another roundabout benefit is the opportunity to work on other projects -- he will feature with Charlie Sheen and Bill Murray in the comedy A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III later this summer -- and further pursue his own writing.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...nderson-335970

[Chocolate Moose]

Did any of those things happen?