I try to give TV shows a couple of viewings before I decide whether I like them or not.

 I’ll be the first to admit that my initial response to ABC’s Castle was wrong. I didn’t like the first few episodes I saw.

Oh sure, Nathan Fillion was just as cute as could be, but the show just didn’t grab me. But about Castle‘s  fourth episode, I had a sea change and began to like this light drama about a mystery writer who helps the NYPD. (And how cool was Michael Connelly’s guest appearance in the season opener?)

Jason Schwartzman and Zach Galifianakis. HBO photo

  I doubt I’ll change my mind about the new HBO series Bored to Death, even if Michael Connelly would make an appearance. (No, he’s not.) It airs at 9:30 p.m. Sundays on HBO with frequent encores.

  Bored to Death has been …well….boring.

This comedy about  Jonathan Ames, a Brooklyn writer who can’t write his second novel. His girlfriend just left him; he drinks too much and runs around too much with his magazine editor who smokes too much pot.

It’s all too much

Because he can’t face reality, Jonathan moonlights as an unlicensed private detective so he pretend to be one of the heroes he loves from classic detective novels.

 Couldn’t he have just wrote to DorothyL about the character he’d like to be for a day and be done with it?

  Jason Schwartzman is charming as the lost Jonathan. Ted Danson is wonderfully smarmy as the insecure pot-smoking editor who seems to think that because Jonathan works for him the writer also is being paid to be his friend. And the HBO execs must be cheering that they landed Zach Galifianakis as Jonathan’s friend Ray Hueston, a comic book illustrator. Galifianakis showed his comedy chops in last summer’s The Hangover and he is quite funny in Bored to Death.

  Despite the good cast, Bored to Death doesn’t rise above a mediocre comedy. It doesn’t capture the heart of private detective novels and it just isn’t funny. HBO has a much better track record than this for original series that grab viewers. Think The Wire, Entourage and a dozen other HBO series.

   Bored to Death is on opposite Dexter, which begins at 9 p.m. Sundays on Showtime. Even with Dexter’s frequent encores, there’s no contest.

Life was the most underappreciated and overlooked cop show on TV.

It’s almost met the ax twice – once because of the writers’ strike and once because of low ratings. It was to have been reprieved again for this new season, but in August finally met its end.

The third time wasn’t the charm to resuscitate Life.

  Life starred Damian Lewis as Charlie Crews, a cop who was sentenced to prison for a murder he didn’t commit. With an unfathomable settlement of millions of dollars, Crews was released and returns to the force.

While he continued to try to find out why he was framed for murder, the real pleasure of this show was watching as Lewis pulled Crews into a Zenlike approach to solving crimes.

Crews’ calmness hide a rage that he constantly battled.

While other cop shows used technology, crime scene investigation and the friction between the police and lawyers, Life took a cerebral approach.

  The solid cast included Lewis, a Golden Globe nominee for Band of Brothers;  Sarah Shahi (Rush Hour 3) as Dani Reese, Charlie’s partner; and Adam Arkin (Chicago Hope) as Crew’s former cellmate Ted Earley.

Life will be missed.

It’s been a few years since I walked the lovely, narrow streets around Oxford University in England – until, that is, last Sunday’s return of the Inspector Lewis mysteries on PBS.

And what a welcomed return for these literate, intelligent mysteries.

Running as Masterpiece Mystery!, the Inspector Lewis series is scheduled to air Sunday nights through Oct. 18 on PBS. Check your local listings.

Inspector Lewis (played by Kevin Whately) began as the working-class sergeant to Inspector Morse in the long-running series based on Colin Dexter’s crime novels. Morse’s death nearly retired Lewis as he was supposed to make only one solo appearance before going into oblivion. Fortunately, the producers were attuned that Inspector Lewis was popular on his own.

The new Masterpiece Mystery! series marks Inspector Lewis’s return to Oxford, now with his own sidekick, the frequently called “dishy” James Hathaway (Laurence Fox).

As befitting the Oxford setting, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats and “the other boys in the band,” as the Romance poets were called during the first episode, and other literary figures are sure to pop up during the investigations.

The first episode focused on Percy Bysshe Shelley and was even called “And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea,” which comes from Shelley’s Love’s Philosophy. Can’t get much more literary than that unless it’s when Hathaway loves to quote Shakespeare, whether it’s appropriate or not.

Hathaway’s smart mouth also often comes into play at just the right time. You know that Inspector Lewis doesn’t know whether to smile or slap him such as when a janitor’s body was found in the archives. “At last,” said Hathaway, “we’ve found a body in the library.”

“And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea” was a tightly plotted episode that included a math professor who teaches blackjack and assignments on how to use math when betting and a phony tour of secret Oxford that included a crocodile in the waters; a bango-playing J. R. R. Tolkien).

Tonight’s episode will revolve around Wagner, boxing and
East Germany’s fall.

The Inspector Lewis series works well because the characters are so believable and the far-flung plot threads eventually mesh into a cohesive story that links Oxford’s history with its present.

I don’t need to return to Oxford when I have Inspector Lewis as my guide.

PHOTO: Laurence Fox as DS Hathaway and Kevin Whately as Inspector Lewis; photo courtesy PBS