As a fan of both Raymond Chandler detective novels and Paul Auster’s neo-noir books, I should be the target audience for HBO’s Bored to Death. But there’s something about the show, created by  Jonathan Ames about a novelist named Jonathan Ames who moonlights as a private investigator, that I just can’t fully embrace.

All the classic P.I. motifs are there in full force. The sleazy bars and motels, filmed with zeal and dazzling art direction at various NYC locations; the man working cases with a mournful air; the bizarre acts of human nature that prompt his clients to contact him. But everything feels too calculated.

Jason Schwartzman’s performance doesn’t help matters. A bumbling, neurotic egghead (think Woody Allen with less tics) with floppy hipster hair, his writer is hardly the world-weary detective who doesn't blink when confronted with the worst of human behavior. Jonathan hardly blinks when he discovers the woman he’s been hired to find tied up in a motel room, but that’s because he’s too delicate and self-obsessed to get beyond his fresh break-up. Schwartzman, an actor I usually enjoy, seems less mournful at the prospect of being unsurprised by life’s cruelties than at the loss of a toy he barely noticed until it was gone.

There’s just something too schticky to enjoy about a Brooklyn writer posing as a P.I. and talking at length to strangers about his addiction to white wine. Call me old-fashioned, but solving crimes calls for unfiltered cigarettes and bourbon. Fans of Ames and neurotic Jewish men may have reason to rejoice over Bored to Death; I’m stuck contemplating the mystery of the missing cynicism.