If the surgeon-general is watching TV Sunday night, expect the government to issue a new warning label later in the week: Confusing fantasy with reality can be hazardous to your marriage or to your documentary. It's a lesson taught amusingly in HBO's new sitcom Bored to Death and painfully in the PBS documentary Vizcaya.
Writing about a warning within, rather than against, an HBO comedy is something of a novel concept. After the Sex and the City franchise moved from TV to film five years ago, the network unleashed a long string of sitcom bombs that detonated so explosively they actually destroyed any memory you'd ever seen them. (Really: Can you remember a single scene from Lucky Louie? Or The Life and Times of Tim?)
But over the past few months, first with the improbable manwhore tale Hung and now with the mock-noir Bored to Death, HBO seems to have rediscovered its comic touch. Read my full reviews in Sunday's Miami Herald.
Comments