JONATHAN AMES: Well I guess I’m hoping to say many things. First of all, one of the things that we’re talking about this season–and it’s a more serialized story–is that Walter pursues one big news story, which is the drought in California and Los Angeles as well as corruption surrounding its water supply, specifically recycled water and that technology. So we make an allusion to Chinatown visually and thematically with Los Angeles, water, and corruption. So that’s the new story. I’m also trying to this season, after establishing all of the characters last year, just going deeper into all of that; the whole ensemble. The kind of the uniting theme is sort of romance, heartbreak, and love.

I was happy to see Walter’s cryptic, stylistic dreams reappearing in the show. Do you see these as a constant in the series to play with each season?

Yeah, in season one it was Burt Lancaster films. In a later episode this season, Walter has another Orson Welles dream, and it’s a scary Orson Welles dream. Last season we did Burt Lancaster and he was swimming and flying, but this year they’re a little darker because he’s caught up in this intrigue. He’s having these ominous Orson Welles dreams. So yeah, it is something that I have fun playing with. Walter lives in Los Angeles, so the fact that he dreams in exact replicas of film clips is a fun, strange thing that’s adjacent to reality. The show itself makes lots of allusion to film and cinema.

Both Blunt Talk and Bored to Death do a really beautiful job at portraying the beauty in male friendships. What about this specific sort of bond are you attracted to?

Well for a long time–about 20 years or so ago–I read Don Quixote, which is very much about the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. So I think that really imprinted on my mind–you know the way animals or babies get imprinted with something. So that dynamic of friendship as a way to tell stories and write dialogue has always been something that’s appealed to me. It’s come up in my novels and almost everything I’ve written.