In a way it's a good thing that the HBO series "Bored to Death" was cancelled, because it may show people in the business the harm that is done by going for the sensational.
The first season was a delight, a show about a struggling writer (who wore plaid sportcoats and narrow striped ties). You can't make a realistic show about a writer - way too much down time - so Jonathan doubled as a detective, following, in one episode, an Indian man who had lost his job and was too ashamed to tell his wife, who in turn thought he was having an affair. But the detective work was almost a sidebar to the real story of Jonathan's relationships, particularly with his cartoonist friend and a father-figure editor modeled on George Plimpton.
There was a show in which Jonathan taught a creative writing class (sparsely attended by characters who were only slight exaggerations) and one in which his editor got laid off after his magazine was purchased by an out-of-town consortium. (Here the show demonstrated more fidelity to the real world than Plimpton's life had ever done.)
But in the last season, the human interactions and social commentaries were pretty much lost in a blaze of shoot-outs and chases. There were still some wonderful moments - the cartoonist with his sperm-child joining a group of breast-feeding mothers in the park - but the show that had been fun and occasionally touching became silly and implausible. The writers should have taken a cue from Downton Abby: Action isn't always where the action is.
