Just recently I was catching up with season three of Bored to Death: Zach Galifianakis cracked a joke about Park Slope, Jason Schwartzman was hanging off of the Williamsburgh Bank Tower, and I turned to my father and asked, “do people who don’t live in Brooklyn find this show funny?” He suggested the hyperlocalism was more an extra layer of hilarity for those in the know, but that it was still a funny show on its own. I think he might have been wrong: yesterday, HBO announced it was canceling Bored to Death, along with several other shows, saddening young people with HBO subscriptions across the borough. Apparently, no one was watching anymore: the show “opened its third season to a… disappointing average viewership of just 240,000,” the Hollywood Reporter reports, “a significant drop from the 1.1 million the second season garnered a year earlier.”
Creator Jonathan Ames has offered to buy us all a drink with his HBO billions:
I invite all fans of Bored to Death to come to the Brooklyn Inn [on] Wednesday, and I’ll buy you a drink. John Hodgman will be joining me and perhaps other local New York City actors from the show will be there, and we can all toast Bored to Death and a completely loony and improbable three-year run.
After all, it’s us locals the show meant the most to. As Mark Asch recently wrote in Brooklyn Magazine:
Bored to Death, lighthearted as it is, means something to Brooklynites unaccustomed to seeing their immediate environs (Hey, that coffee shop is Smooch! Hey, that’s a La Strada song on the soundtrack!) represented accurately in the mass media…