--- name: "Jonathan Ames" canonical: "https://film.one/person/jonathan-ames" roles: ["Creator","Writer"] born: "23 March 1964" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T01:18:17.675894+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Jonathan Ames Creator and writer. Born 23 March 1964 in New York, NY, USA. ## Details - **Work:** Creator, Writer - **Born:** 23 March 1964, New York, NY, USA ## Fi1m on Jonathan Ames > Jonathan Ames writes the same man over and over, low on energy, high on confession, and writes him well. What he has never quite worked out, on the page or on screen, is what that man should do next. Jonathan Ames's great subject is Jonathan Ames. In *Bored to Death* (2009) he created a television series about a Brooklyn novelist called Jonathan Ames, played by Jason Schwartzman, who cannot write his second book and advertises himself online as a private detective with no licence and no experience. Nobody else would have thought that a workable premise for a half-hour comedy, and nobody else would have had the nerve to use his own name. The hero drifts, drinks white wine in the afternoon and confesses to everyone, and that is the Ames voice carried over more or less intact. He had spent twenty years refining it on the page first. A debut novel, *I Pass Like Night*, came out in 1989, straight after Princeton, and the novels and comic memoirs that followed through the 1990s and 2000s blurred what he had done with what he had made up, most of it neurotic and much of it sexual. A long-running New York Press column kept the confessions coming. Television arrived in 2009 and ran for three seasons; a second series, *Blunt Talk* (2015–2016), was created with Seth MacFarlane and built around Patrick Stewart. Two of his books have become films: *The Extra Man* (2010), on which he worked on the screenplay, and *You Were Never Really Here* (2017), from a 2012 novella. What he does well is write for a particular actor. In *Bored to Death* the material for Ted Danson is so much better than the material around it that we thought Danson worth the evening on his own, and *Blunt Talk* was plainly shaped to Stewart's rhythms rather than the other way round. He also has a good ear for the way a few men talk to each other in a bar, and much less interest in how anyone else talks at all. What he does badly is story. Twenty-four episodes of a detective comedy ought to contain a case somebody wants solved, and somewhere in the second season we realised we could no longer say what the week's case was, and had stopped minding. We liked the company and we drifted, which is a pleasant way to spend an hour and a poor way to run a noir. The look did not help him: eight directors, and none of them found a shadow. He has since moved to Los Angeles and turned to crime fiction proper with the Happy Doll novels. "I had been reading detective stuff since the 1980s. It first began to rear its head with a short story, 'Bored to Death'," he has said, and that is the honest chronology: the detective came before the television. Whether a novel, with no eighth episode to fill, finally obliges him to let a case end is the thing we would most like to know about him. ## Biography Jonathan Ames is an American author, television creator and occasional actor. Born on 23 March 1964 in New York, he has written novels and comic memoirs, and created two television series. He created and wrote the HBO series *Bored to Death* (2009–2011), in which he also made a cameo appearance as Irwin. He later created and wrote the Starz series *Blunt Talk* (2015–2016). Ames has appeared in acting roles including on *Curb Your Enthusiasm* and in the film *The Great Buck Howard* (2008). *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, nytimes.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Bored to Death* (2009), Fi1m 50, Creator, Writer — [page](https://film.one/tv/bored-to-death.md) ## Also known for - *Sabrina, the Teenage Witch* (1996), Sam - *The Great Buck Howard* (2008), Edward Kelly - *Guilty by Suspicion* (1991), Cabbie - *The Extra Man* (2010), Screenplay - *Blunt Talk* (2015), Writer - *American Loser* (2007), Chairperson --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/jonathan-ames