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Lesbians fall into stereotypes on “Bored to Death”

HBO’s Brooklyn-tastic, hipster-gasmic Bored to Death wraps up its first season Sunday night, and of all the philosophical questions the show poses in its eight-episode run, perhaps the most enigmatic one is this: If a lesbian storyline falls in the writers’ room and no sperm is around to touch it, does it make a sound?

Bored to Death follows Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman), an earnest, neurotic “self-hating Jew,” who is having trouble writing his second novel. When his girlfriend leaves him in the pilot episode because he refuses to quit drinking and smoking pot – even though he’s curtailed his consumption to white wine – he decides to place an add on Craigslist advertising his services as an unlicensed private investigator.

Why? Because he’s bored and broke, and that’s the idea that grabbed him while he was reading a detective novel, drinking white wine and smoking pot.

At the end of the the pilot, we meet Jonathan’s best friend Ray (Zach Galifianakis), a morose cartoonist whose girlfriend refuses to sleep with him – which works out well for everyone because The Lesbians are coming for his sperm.

Bored to Death’s episodes revolve around Jonathan’s “detective business.” Every week he receives a call from someone who stumbles across his add on Craigslist and needs assistance tracking down a lost love, tailing a potentially-unfaithful boyfriend or recovering a sex tape.

The lesbian story-arc begins in episode three, “The Case of the Missing Screenplay.”

Over breakfast, Ray tells his girlfriend, Leah (Heather Burns), that he met a lesbian couple who asked him for a sperm donation – at a coffee shop.

I’m not sure how that works – “I’ll take a Venti non-fat, half-caff, quarter-sweet, sugar-free vanilla latte. And some of your sperm”?

Leah is less than thrilled with the prospect of Ray fathering someone else’s child.

Ray: They’re very nice ladies! Well, one of them is. I’d be doing them a huge favor.

Leah: I don’t feel good about this; I don’t want you to be a sperm donor.

Ray: But it’s flattering! They’re fans of my work! I’ve never had lesbian fans before.

Leah: They should go to a sperm bank. You can’t just give your sperm to two girls you met in a cafe.

Ray: I met you in a cafe.

Leah says she’s concerned about over-population; after all, there’s a plastic island the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. Ray argues that helping one lesbian couple have a child isn’t going to add that much plastic to the island, so Leah snips that he’s not listening to her. No, really listening. Listening, listening. She suggests he go to therapy to work out his listening issues.

Ray’s response? “OK, I’ll trade you therapy for sex. It’s been almost three weeks.”

Oh, to be conceived because of an ill-advised sex-for-therapy transaction.

Ray stands to fill up his coffee cup, and we get an eye-full of him in his skivvies. Apparently he and Leah had this conversation on pants-less Tuesday, the day of the week all freelancers go without trousers.

Not that I know anything about that.

Ahem.

Anyway, if you think that’s charming, just you wait. In episode four, “The Case of the Stolen Skateboard,” Jonathan drops by Ray and Leah’s place for drinks, and he meets Michelle (Zoe Lister Jones) and Lisa (Jenn Harris), the sperm-snatching lesbian couple.

Jonathan: Where’s Ray?

Leah: He’s in the bathroom, masturbating.

Ray: [from the bathroom] I’m almost done, just three more tugs.

Makes you wish you really could order sperm at Starbucks, huh?

Jonathan: Um, why is he doing that?

Michelle: Well, Ray and Leah are being really generous with us, and Ray is giving us his sperm so that we can have a baby. Tonight’s our first exchange.

Leah: But I’m not the one being generous.

Michelle: I think you are; sharing your lover’s sperm with us is very kind of you.

Lisa: Yeah, we really need the stuff; there’s no getting around it. And what my Michelle wants, she gets.

Lisa’s abrupt, gum-smacking, deep-voiced delivery is to actual lesbians what Apu Nahasapeemapetilon‘s accent is to actual Indians. Jonathan doesn’t dwell on that, though; he’s acquainted with the absurd. He spends half his life baked out of his mind, and the other half chasing down stolen skateboards.

Jonathan: Well, congratulations.

Lisa: Thanks, as long as the baby doesn’t come out with a beard, we’ll be happy.

Michelle: Oh, stop. We’re just hoping our child will become an artist. What do you do? In case we want a different kind of baby.

Ray: [from the bathroom] I heard that!

Michelle: [laughs] No, seriously. What do you do?

Finally Ray emerges with his sperm, and when Leah protests that she doesn’t want it in the refrigerator with her kids’ lunch boxes, Lisa volunteers a cooler they brought along. This prompts Leah to hurl the grande, half-chilled, Sperm au Lait across the room. Ray calmly fetches the container, calls it Picasso, kisses it goodbye, and hands it over to Lisa and Michelle.

And that’s the last we ever see of them.

Ray makes reference to The Lesbians in the next few episodes, telling Jonathan that they’re “draining” him with their constant demands. He even starts a comic book about his donation process.

It isn’t until episode seven, “The Case of the Stolen Sperm,” that Ray revisits Michelle and Lisa. Well, he tries to revisit Michelle and Lisa – but they’ve skipped town.

At first Ray imagines that they’ve been in a horrific accident and that they’re both in comas. Jonathan says there’s very little chance that they’re both in comas, which proves he doesn’t know anything about lesbian couples, because as Ray points out: “They do everything together.”

Jonathan and Ray break into Michelle and Lisa’s apartment, and discover that they really have moved. The only thing they left behind was an unopened bottle of Kombucha and a spreadsheet detailing the 30 lesbian couples they sold Ray’s sperm to.

What follows is one the truly funny moments of Bored to Death’s first season. In a musical montage set to The Explorer’s Club’s “Forever,” Jonathan and Ray track down the lesbians who bought Ray’s sperm. All of them were expecting a muscular, vegan scholar with a Mathematics Ph.D. from Stanford, not a chunky, out-of-work cartoonist. Some of the lesbians give him what-for because he’s not virile; some almost clock him because he’s a meat eater; and some just shout at him to get off their porch.

Only one of the 30 lesbian couples was able to conceive a baby with Ray’s sperm, and the pregnant one makes it perfectly clear that she never wants to see Ray again.

And that brings us back to lesbian storylines falling in the writers’ room.

There are plenty of lesbian stereotypes on Bored to Death. It depicts Park Slope as home to a thousand lesbian couples, all of whom are radical vegans that buy their food at a local co-op, have “those triangle tattoos” that “stand for vaginas or women’s restrooms or something like that,” and are filled with such an insatiable desire to reproduce that they’re willing to buy unknown, untested sperm from the black market.

But the show is written by a quintessential Brooklyn writer named Jonathan Ames about a quintessential Brooklyn writer named Jonathan Ames. Naval-gazing and stereotyping just kind of go with the territory.

And unlike other male-centric comedies on HBO – I’m looking at you, Entourage – Bored to Death’s men treat women with a lot of respect.

In fact, the female guest-casting is pretty inspired.

Kristen Wiig plays a Jessica Rabbit-esque alcoholic who thinks her boyfriend is cheating on her, when he’s actually just attending Al-anon meetings.

Wiig’s Saturday Night Live co-star Jenny Slate (of F-Bomb fame) plays Jonathan’s stoner love interest.

Laila Robins is George’s (Ted Danson) ex-wife.

Parker Posey is an overprotective mom who hires Jonathan to recover her son’s stolen skateboard.

Essayist, historian and Partly Cloudy Patriot Sarah Vowell guest stars as a reporter.

And The Daily Show’s former special correspondent Samantha Bee plays the un-pregnant lesbian in the couple who conceived with Ray’s sperm.

At its heart, Bored to Death is a mellow rumination on hipster culture, with enough literary references thrown in to make a bibliophile’s heart soar. It’s probably not worth your time if you’re looking for an original lesbian tale. But if you are a lesbian who owns dog-eared copies of every Sarah Vowell book, you might enjoy it.

The best I can say about Bored to Death’s lesbian storyline is that while it’s not fresh, it’s also not offensive. And if writers are going to embrace cliches when they write lesbian characters, boring is almost always better than dead.

The final episode of the first season of Bored to Death airs this Sunday at 9:30 pm on HBO.

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