PASADENA, Calif. - Writer Jonathan Ames is bound to attract certain adjectives - funny, peculiar, downright odd - but boring's not one of them.

Which might have been the point Ames was trying to make when he opened a recent Television Critics Association press conference for his new HBO series, "Bored to Death," with a "hairy call."

Describing it as an attempt to "sort of break the ice," Ames prefaced his performance - which sounded like a cross between a bird call and a distress signal - by promising reporters he'd "project in a Shakespearean way."

"It's a childhood sound that my friends and I would make on the playground when being attacked by more normal children," he said.

TV critics, unused to being mistaken for "more normal" anything, nevertheless appeared unfazed.

We were, after all, dealing with a guy who'd written a show about a blocked writer named Jonathan Ames who, in the wake of a breakup, decides to advertise himself on Craigslist as an unlicensed private investigator.

What's more, the Jonathan Ames who'd be taking cases, and maybe even solving them, while fending off his out-of-control editor (Ted Danson), listening to the problems of his comic-book illustrator best friend ("The Hangover's" Zach Galifianakis) and trying to win back his girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby), would be played by Jason Schwartzman ("Rushmore," "Funny People").

Who doesn't look remotely like the real Ames.

"I don't see the character as being really me," the writer said afterward.

"He shares a lot of my DNA. It's more like a cousin, you know? But Jason is like such an amazing artist - he's a songwriter [he performs the show's theme song, which he co-wrote with Ames], so he could play a writer - and I just think he's like an old soul, so he's very much a muse."

So Ames is being inspired as a writer by the person playing him as a writer on-screen?

"Yeah, I'm inspired by Jason, because I just want to see how he's going to handle things, and he's very comedic. He's a great physical comedian."

Plus, said Ames, "he's a wonderful person . . . He's often played sometimes snotty characters or something, but the truth of the matter is he's one of those human beings who's sort of filled with honey."

Ames, whose eight books include the graphic novel "The Alcoholic" and, most recently, a collection of fiction and nonfiction called "The Double Life Is Twice as Good," wouldn't seem to have suffered overmuch from the on-screen Ames' writer's block.

The show, which premieres Sept. 20 after the Season 7 debut of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," grew, he told reporters, out of his "longtime love and fascination for detective novels," and the desire to be "a hero."

"The story that I initially wrote, which became the basis for the series, was me getting a chance to be heroic through a fictional character," he said.

"Right after I wrote it, someone did ask me to find a colon hygienist who had gone missing who had once given me a colonic.

"It was so strange." *

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