This past weekend my Twitter feed was aflutter with news about the new season premieres of some of cable TV’s finest: Showtime’s Dexter and HBO’s Eastbound & Down. While we were twittering about serial killers and Danny McBride, we all missed HBO’s quieter second season premiere of Bored to Death.
For those of you new to Bored to Death, HBO’s noir comedy stars Jason Schwartzman as Jonathan Ames, a struggling writer and an unlicensed private detective. 
His cohorts include Zach Galifianakis as comic book artist Ray Hueston and Ted Danson as magazine editor George Christopher. With a cast like that, how can you resist this quirky and incredibly likeable series?
For those of you not new to Bored to Death, we’ve got good news. HBO is offering the second season’s premiere online for free. That’s right folks, we said free. This is a rare occurrence for the good old Home Box Office, who typically streams their episodes online only on pay sites, such as Comcast, Amazon VOD or iTunes. Not this time. The episode is available on TV.com and HBO for free. If you want to watch it on HBO you’ll have to sign up for a free account, but TV.com streams the episode like normal with no registration commitments.
We’re hoping that this is a sign of good things to come with some of HBO’s other popular series. Showtime typically puts the premiere episode of each of its shows’ new seasons online, and it certainly does make it easier for those of us without cable to sample the network’s offerings without first breaking the bank. We hope HBO will begin to follow Showtime’s example on a steadier basis, but only time will tell.
For now, let’s all thank HBO for giving us a second season with Jonathan Ames, Private Detective.
