Bored to Death - Creator Jonathan Ames on the Show’s Cancellation

How are you holding up?
Okay. Pretty good. I'm kind of in a numb state. I have a cold, just so you don't think I've been weeping. Don't write, "Ames' voice was froggy from weeping!"

How did you first find out that the show was being canceled?
In years past, I'd be told to get to work on the next season by mid-November, so I knew for a while it wasn't looking great. I kind of feel like I've been in the stages of mourning: denial, teeth gnashing, acceptance, confusion — wait, that's not one of the stages, is it? The show was like a Summer Stock theater group to me. We'd all get together for three months and get incredibly close. It was sort of like the circus life. And our friendship was somewhat based on this shared purpose, so it's sad to lose that. When I told Ted Danson the news, he said, "I can't believe we're not going to get together and laugh for three months."

Was it because of the ratings? Or did the network have one too many incest themes on its shows?
The incest didn't have anything to do with it. HBO said they were pleased with the show, creatively, so I always had hope there was room in the budget for us. But Sunday night is their night. They don't have a lot of room for their original programming on the schedule, and being on Monday nights was a problem. That's never a good night for HBO, in the sense of traditional live viewership, since you're going up against Two and a Half Men and Monday Night Football. And I totally understand the whole thing of not wanting to sit down when someone tells you to. But if you count all the DVR, HBO Go, replay viewership, we were in the millions. That's one of the things that's annoyed me a little bit about the coverage of the cancellation — the numbers were not weak. We've done extremely well in nontraditional viewership, and we've had a very generous critical response. Maybe we need to change the model.

Source: Full interview @ Vulture

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