Heather Havrilesky

“Deadwood” creator David Milch took a roundabout path to Hollywood, earning his MFA in fiction at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, then teaching literature at Yale University for nine years before writing his first script, a “Hill Street Blues” episode that won an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award and a Humanitas Prize. Taking the awards as a less-than-subtle hint that he had a talent for dramatic writing, Milch left New Haven, Conn., to join the staff of “Hill Street Blues” for five seasons. Later, he co-created “NYPD Blue” with Steven Bochco, and during his seven years on the show, helped transform the procedural drama into something far richer and more dynamic than audiences had seen before.

Milch spoke to me on the phone recently from “Deadwood’s” Santa Clarita set during the last two weeks of shooting the show’s second season (which premieres Sunday on HBO). With a steady drawl as wry as Jack Nicholson’s, Milch talked about how Hollywood fear created the saccharine westerns of yore and how the community of Deadwood strove to maintain order in the absence of law.

What fueled your move from academics to television?

Well, my now-wife and I wanted to get married and have a family and I wasn’t making any dough teaching, and of course what I was making, I was using to buy drugs. She was getting a little tired of me selling her clothes and furniture.

That’s a common problem among Yale professors.

Yes, we decided we would take a different approach.

How did you first become interested in writing a western?

I had proposed to HBO a series about the city cops in Rome at the time of Nero. What had interested me was the idea of order without law. The Praetorian Guard, who were the emperor’s guards, understood how they were to proceed. But for the city cops, who were called the Urban Cohorts, there was no law at all. So they were sort of making themselves up as they went along. I wanted to focus on that idea of how order is generated in the absence of law. They [HBO] were already doing a show about Rome in the time of Caesar, so they asked if I could engage the same themes in a different setting, and that was how I decided to do the western.

Were you a fan of westerns before?

No. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them; it’s just I didn’t watch them particularly. When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.

It was, like, Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid. It just didn’t interest me particularly. I was innocent of the classical westerns of the ’30s and ’40s — they had just sort of passed me by. I guess in a sort of paradoxical way . . . You know, the future is constantly redefining the past. In my case, the fact that I had not had that exposure, I think, turned out probably to be a good enough thing.

When I’m describing the show to someone, they’ll sometimes say, “Oh, but I don’t really like westerns,” and I’ll try to explain that it’s something quite different than what they are imagining.

The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the ’20s and ’30s and it has really nothing to do with the West, and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was. The first term of the Hays Code is that obscenity in word or fact or action is an offense against God and man and will not be depicted. In the early ’20s there were starting to be films that were kind of racy and these guys didn’t want their hustle to be jeopardized. So they formed this production board which essentially announced that, let us run the show and we will give you an America disinfected and pure.

Working in network television I had something of a similar experience. You know, you can spend your time pissing and moaning about the strictures within which you’re forced to work, or you can try and find ways to neutralize the distorting effect of those strictures, which is to develop personalities [or] characters whose own internal process winds up at the same place as the external strictures, but for internal reasons. So, what the great western storytellers did was develop stoic characters who lived by a code and then a kind of justifying dramatic structure which validated that. Every storyteller works within the conventions of his time, and there were some great westerns done. But by the time I was watching them, the pernicious effect of the code itself had created a kind of sanitized and mediocre version of it. So, when I came to do “Deadwood,” I sort of came to it fresh.

So the code was developed by directors who wanted to offer America a vision of itself that was clean and pretty?

Yeah, because they lived in mortal fear of being found out. The dream factory was operated exclusively by immigrant Jews. Goldwyn, Mayer … [and they wanted to] stay sort of behind the scenes, because there was developing a real vein of anti-Semitism and misgiving. The popular thinkers of the ’20s were guys like [Charles] Lindbergh and Henry Ford and so on, who were saying, “The money-lenders are taking over the temple.” So, what these guys did was come up with a four-square American kind of vision with an unwritten guarantee: Let us run the show, and you will get 150 features a year which glorify innocence and an absence of conflict and so on. When people started to see the stuff like D.W. Griffith, people got good and scared.

It sounds like a part of you is reacting against that tradition.

No, I’m not reacting against it. I was mystified when I began to do the research. It seemed so obvious to me that the West I was encountering in my research … had nothing to do with the westerns, which I was experiencing secondhand, which weren’t even good on their own terms. But then going back and seeing the classical westerns, those, too, had nothing to do with the West that I was studying, so I then tried to do some research to figure out how that had happened, how the western of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s had developed, and what I discovered was that it had everything to do with what Hollywood was about at that time, and nothing to do with what the West was about.

So the aspect of the West that you were interested in had to do with the lawlessness of that era?

The improvised quality. You know, the cop series I had done tried to engage the theme that in order to administer the law, you have to break the law. That is, that the idea of equality before the law is an operating fiction of democracy. Any cop will tell you. If a cop is forced to watch a cop show, and he hears the suspect given his Miranda warning, he just turns away, because no suspect is ever given his Miranda warning until after the cop has gotten the information he needs. If he’s given his Miranda warning, the cop can’t do his job, because then the cop has to turn him over to a lawyer. What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.

Now, that’s a separate matter from the illusions … What we say in our treasured documents is not, “These truths are self-evident, that all men are created equal.” What we say is, “We hold these truths to be self-evident” — in other words, we’re going to act as if these truths are self-evident, but in practice, those truths have never been self-evident. And the reason that cops only trust other cops is because they know that they’ve been hired to lie, they’ve been hired to beat the balls off people, and get them to confess so they can be excluded from society. That’s the first part of their job. The second part of their job is to lie about what they did. And the third part of their job is to know that if they’re caught, they’re going to be put in jail.

So for me, what every cop always told me was, “Every time I see a guy in a suit, I’m afraid I’m gonna get locked up.” I wanted to push that situation further, to the point where it was acknowledged by everyone that there was no law, and then to try and figure out how we govern ourselves, how we improvise the structures of governance in an environment which acknowledges that it is the abrogation of everything but brute force.

As you watch “Deadwood,” you find yourself believing in this moral relativism. You start to fear the hand of the law more than you fear the chaos of unchecked crime. You start to feel that the law has no place in this environment.

Or that the place that it finds is predicated in an illusion. Seth Bullock — I would say 90 percent of the characters are real — and Bullock, who was the first sheriff and who founded the first national park and became Theodore Roosevelt’s best friend and in fact led the inauguration parade, was a guy with a murderous personality who embraced the idea of law as the only way he could control himself. The first scene of the first episode shows him hanging a guy rather than letting the mob hang him. That was a true story, and what he said was, “If he’s gonna be hung, he’s gonna be hung under color of law.” For Bullock, the color of law as a disinfecting of the kind of violence which was inside him, as an accommodation and protection of him from himself, was the essence of his personality. That’s a highly adaptive trait in the kind of Darwinian environment that he found himself in — which is to say, he was every bit as violent as the next guy, but his violence expressed itself in an impulse to expressions of order. And so, that’s how legal codes get developed.

You know, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a study of the common law, said that the law develops out of society’s need to minimize the collateral consequences of the taking of revenge. What that means is, if I kill your horse, and you come and kill my horse and my family and burn down my house, the disruption to society of the collateral effects of the taking of revenge, which is justified, is such that society is gonna be disrupted. So what law does is say, “If you kill a horse, you will be subject to this much punishment.” To the extent that that stabilizes the process of taking of revenge, that’s how laws get developed.

How do you see the sinister Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) relative to Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant)? Because in Bullock, you describe a certain kind of twisting of chaos and order, and good and bad.

To me, they’re part of the same personality. I try not to judge any of the characters. Henry James used to say that characters are obstinate finalities, and irreducible. I think you’ll see in the first episode just how indissolubly associated those two characters are. And in real life, they sort of divided the camp. It was like a Manichaean heresy. Swearengen ran the Badlands and Bullock ran the rest of the camp. But I think that each of them is lost in a particular way. I don’t think that Swearengen has any more of an articulate understanding of what moves him than Bullock does; it’s just that his compulsions do not invoke a legal framework. You know, if you look at Swearengen, all of Swearengen’s whores are bought at the same orphanage where he was raised, including a cripple who has absolutely no use to him at any pragmatic level. He is constantly presenting himself as a pure pragmatist, yet to insist on getting your whores at one particular orphanage is at once an impulse to take revenge on women, and also to rescue women. And in that complication is where most of us live our lives. And he no less than Bullock has a life which lives him, much more, I think, than he lives his life.

It’s that inner conflict that’s very relatable in each character.

Yeah, I think Swearengen is a lineal descent of Sipowitz on “NYPD Blue.” You know, as they say, the devil always gets the best lines. Sipowitz was, in a lot of ways, very much like my dad, who was as complicated and driven and finally a great, great soul, with all sorts of compulsions and abuses and so on. I think that God takes us whole. And as you say, Swearengen is a very relatable personality. I think ultimately Bullock is every bit as relatable but not nearly so accessible.

That’s funny, because Swearengen kind of reminds me of my dad in some ways; Ian McShane looks a little like him, for one thing. What’s interesting is that Swearengen has more outlets for his passionate personality than Bullock does. So in some ways, it feels like Bullock is more tortured than Swearengen is.

Yes, exactly. [Bullock] will not share himself in the same way.

But what I love about the show is that you find things to care about in a wide range of different characters.

Some people will not know themselves. As the minister says at Hickok’s funeral, he quotes Paul — that was what I wanted to do that Roman show about, was the first guy they arrested was Saint Paul. But Paul says, “If the hand shall say, ‘Because I am not the foot, I am not therefore the body of Christ,’ is it not of the body?” In other words, because we misunderstand our natures, does that exclude us from the community of spirits? And the answer is no, it just means we misunderstand our natures. So many of these characters misunderstand their natures, but that does not prevent us from recognizing that they’re of the body of Christ. My feeling about “Deadwood” is it’s a single organism, and I think human society is the body of God, and in a lot of ways it’s about the different parts of the body having a somewhat more confident sense of their identity over the course of time.

So, do you mean that the characters have more of a sense of their own identity?

A more confident sense of their identity as members of something larger than themselves. You see, for example, Merrick, played by Jeffrey Jones, who so likes being in company with others and who is so isolated, and he’s trying to extract some reliable organizing principle. He says, “Gentlemen, after every meal, what is to keep us from walking together? Perhaps we could form a club. We’ll call ourselves ‘the Ambulators’!” And you know, the other guys just walk away from him.

But it’s that impulse. If you go to any small town, you’ll see in the center of town signs that advertise the weekly meeting of the Lion’s Club and the Optimists and the Kiwanis. You know, a bowling team, a bridge club? All of those things express our impulse to recognize that our most confident and satisfied sense of our individuality is found in relating to something outside of us. You know, when they [the residents of Deadwood] have their first town meeting and someone by accident serves peaches, and from that time on, they have to have peaches, because they’re not exactly sure what the fuck made it work, you know, and they don’t want to louse things up. There’s something so beautiful in the arbitrariness of all of our traditions and it speaks to our frailty and how tentative our understanding of ourselves is. I like that stuff.

So, how do you keep this really complicated organism alive? Did you know you’d have so many characters and that so many of them would have such major story lines?

No, I don’t plan any of the episodes. They just sort of happened. I sit down each morning and the scenes sort of declare themselves. When you do research, you study and study and study. And then, if you’re a storyteller, you try to put all of that in your preconscious, then you forget the research.

Do you write the show alone?

I have a pretty heavy hand. I work on pretty much every scene. First they [the other writers] do drafts, and then I work on them.

What kinds of characters do you enjoy writing the most? Do you favor certain characters?

No. You know, William James said that what every spiritual experience has in common is ego suppression at depth. That is, one loses one’s sense of one’s own separate identity, and experiences a kind of in-rush of either a sense of God or one’s commonality with others. So when I write, I try to have no favorites. I try to be sort of a vessel of the character, and that’s how I feel a part of the body of Christ. I feel that they’re all part of a single thing, and they just exhibit their sameness differently, if that makes sense.

It does. Do you feel like you’re channeling God or the spirits when you write?

Well, I think we all are vessels of God, you know. As Saint Paul says, if the hand doesn’t know, that doesn’t mean it’s not part of the body, that just means it doesn’t know. And that’s why, when I’m able to be of service to the characters, I experience God’s presence more acutely than I do when I’m not working. So I try to work as much as I can.

To all of Salon’s readers: You’re some of the most engaged and outspoken readers on the Web, and my writing has benefited from both your criticism and your encouragement. I genuinely appreciate your support over the years. Please feel free to drop me a line via Twitter, keep up with my latest work through my website, the rabbit blog, and look for my memoir, “Disaster Preparedness,” on Dec. 30 from Riverhead Books.

Few writers ever get the chance to enjoy a job that’s as creatively fulfilling as this one, or to write for an audience as smart and as insightful as Salon’s. Although it’s time for me to move on to new challenges, I will look back fondly on my years at Salon and feel grateful for them.

While the old familiar faces of late night don’t do much more than make us chuckle ourselves to sleep at night, one man has been calmly and quietly upping his game: Jimmy Kimmel. Despite his distance from the action, it was Kimmel who took some of the most direct shots at Leno during the late night wars. In addition to imitating Leno on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and then appearing on Leno’s show and insulting him to his face, Kimmel has been more outspoken than Conan himself about Leno’s sneaky strategy to take back “The Tonight Show” (although Bill Carter’s new book, “The War for Late Night,” seems to suggest that Leno wasn’t quite so calculating as Kimmel and others seem to assume). When asked in an interview with GQ this month what he learned from the late night dust-up, Kimmel replied: “The lesson is, it pays to be sneaky. I think that’s the main thing I learned. That, and don’t trust Jay Leno.”

It’s this frank talk that sets Jimmy Kimmel apart from his peers. Throw in the sharpest and funniest opening monologue on late night, an incredible knack for improv, and liberal use of off-kilter gimmicks and skits, and it’s no wonder that Kimmel has risen to the rank of late night king. Whether he’s launching a multitiered attack on Facebook idiocy with his National Unfriend Day, finding creative new ways to insult Matt Damon, or shooting an entire episode during a power outage using only his webcam, Kimmel has always had that combination of swagger and imagination that separates the good talk show hosts from the great ones. Like Johnny Carson and Letterman in his heyday, Kimmel has the bluster and the quick wit to make every moment watching him on the air feel dynamic and exciting.

That’s no small feat, of course, but it’s what real late night heroism demands. Kimmel tackles pop culture with more sharp wit and weirdo flair than any of the other late night hosts, whether he’s addressing the new Spider-Man musical (“I’ve been working on a superhero show myself, it’s called ‘Aquaman on Ice.’ Aquaman on skates, trying desperately to speak to his friends who are trapped under the layer of ice. That’s a musical!”), rumors that Snoop Dogg will play at Prince William’s bachelor party (“I’m excited for His Highness, and by His Highness, I mean both of them”), airline security pat-downs (“We freak out if a TSA agent touches us on the outside of our pants, but Black Friday, we will hump each other’s heads to get at Walmart to save 8 bucks on a PSP”), or even the plans to have Lindsay Lohan appear on “Dancing With the Stars” (“I would love to see her vomit on Len Goodman”).

When he’s interviewing guests, Kimmel is arguably better on his feet and more ready with unexpected quips than any other host. On a recent episode when Ben Affleck waxed sympathetic about hard economic times in America, Kimmel soon hinted that no one wants to hear a megastar fake emotion for the little people.

Affleck: I don’t think there’s anybody in the United States that hasn’t been affected (by the recession) in some way or another.

Kimmel: Oprah hasn’t been affected at all.

On another recent episode, Kimmel took an otherwise bland interview with Kate Bosworth and livened it up. (And let’s face it, the real test of good late-night hosting lies in finding some way to spice up interviews with dull, self-involved young actors and actresses. In addition to Kimmel, only Letterman and Craig Ferguson manage it with any regularity.)

Bosworth: (on her Korean co-star) He literally is the Brad Pitt of Korea. It’s pretty wild.

Kimmel: Really? ‘Cause I was told I was the Brad Pitt of Korea. That’s disappointing. I feel like I was lied to. (pause) He’s the Brad Pitt of Korea. And so does that mean he adopts a whole bunch of white kids, or how does that work?

He even managed to save an interview with Paris Hilton from the bowels of hell:

Hilton: (on her current boyfriend) Right now, I’m just so happy. He’s my best friend.

Kimmel: Wait a minute, now. I saw a television show in which you picked a best friend and he wasn’t it. Are you telling me that was not your real BFF?

Later, when Hilton called her new perfume “my tenth fragrance,” Kimmel countered, “That seems like too many fragrances to me.”

This is where the fans of Jimmy Fallon, who have been rallying lately to crown their contagiously giddy leader the supreme ruler of late night, really must admit defeat. While Fallon’s antics try our patience in all the right ways (Zach Galifianakis’ recent appearance, followed by a skit the very finest flavor of stupid, marked a recent high point), Fallon is a pretty bland interviewer, sometimes resembling Chris Farley’s guffawing yes-man talk show host of “SNL” legend. Nonetheless, Fallon is undoubtedly in the groove lately, with such sure-footed oddball gimmicks and quirky enthusiasm that it makes you wonder if “The Chris Farley Show” itself wouldn’t have morphed into something deliciously strange, if given enough time. And let’s face it, anyone who makes Helen Mirren play beer pong deserves at least an honorable mention, if not an Emmy.

While he might be the best Neil Young impersonator on late night (or anywhere else), Fallon has none of the subtle snideness that made Carson, Letterman and now Kimmel masters of the craft. Sure, the kind folks down at the local elementary school’s bake sale might find such a tone distasteful, but the rest of us, who’ve been marinating in a toxic mix of “The Love Boat,” People magazine and celebreality shows for years now, need a healthy dollop of scorn to make the celebrity promotional appearance go down a little more smoothly.

Fans of Craig Ferguson will point out that he shares the requisite doubting tone in his interviews, and also scores very high for sheer courage of conviction. And it’s true that to watch half a second of Ferguson’s show is to love him, from his googly-eyed knowing looks to his perverse but genius rambling asides. His self-effacing charms make his perhaps the most unpredictable and unruly of the late night shows. However enchantingly strange Ferguson’s monologues and interviews may be, they just don’t stack up to Kimmel’s.

And like Letterman, Kimmel carries the torch of bemoaning his network overlords, lamenting the dumb stuff ABC makes him promote. The imbedded advertising — Bud Light signs on the stage, Old Navy promotions at the start of the show, constant appearances by “Dancing With the Stars” contestants — isn’t all that easy to ignore, but Kimmel makes the best of it. He’s taken to calling himself “the three-headed dog the stars must pass on their way to no-dancing hell,” and after that show’s big finale, he told his audience, “I tell you something, I had a good morning. I woke up this morning, and for about three minutes, couldn’t remember who won “Dancing With the Stars” this year. It felt great, it really did.”

But Kimmel should wake up feeling great every morning. After all, who would’ve thought that this guy would be the big winner of the late night debacle of 2010? When you flip from Conan to Leno to Letterman, or stay up for Carson Daly or Fallon or Ferguson, even though you might appreciate Ferguson’s bizarro self-deprecating digressions or Fallon’s raw enthusiasm, Kimmel is the only host who will make you laugh out loud more than a few times per episode. He’s got the sharpest monologue, the most interesting digressions and skits, and the best interviewing skills. Now that the dust has cleared, “The Tonight Show” doesn’t look like a prize worth squabbling over, because, with or without the Cheesecake Factory backdrop, Jimmy Kimmel is the new Johnny Carson.

“OK, have a great weekend!” I replied.

Old people are a little checked out, it’s true. But we’re amiably comatose. This friendly state of autopilot is the only way we’ve found to manage our dashed dreams, our growing contempt for the culture, our creeping disappointments, our fibromyalgia. We grind our teeth at night and have vivid dreams about screwing cheerleaders. We resent the unflattering shape of matchstick jeans and daydream about gigantic claw-foot bathtubs we can’t afford. Our elbows hurt and our hair always looks bad and we secretly think all electropop sounds like Kraftwerk.

Recognizing the defeat in each other’s eyes, we smile warmly and say things like, “Of course! We’d love to,” and “Fantastic! I can’t wait!” because we recognize that everyone is flawed and just barely able to accept their own mediocrity or tolerate the frustrations of advancing age. The least we can do is be nice about it.

Youngish (under 35) skeptics will tell you that the men of “Men of a Certain Age” (premieres Dec. 6 on TNT) don’t talk like men at all, they talk like post-menopausal book club members. This show isn’t made for those youngish people, though. It’s made for the oldish (over 35) among us, who recognize the self-doubting, second-guessing, pot-bellied guys on their TV screen as a painfully palpable embodiments of the humiliations and tiny little ego victories of middle age.

The charms of “Men of a Certain Age,” like the charms of growing old, are lost on the common whippersnapper. While youngish people tend to reevaluate and reappraise their oldest friendships constantly, questioning whether this or that old friend is up to speed with just how advanced and mature and evolved the new “me” is, old people recognize that they haven’t actually advanced or matured or evolved much over the years. Thus do they humbly turn to each other, all rumpled feathers and matted fur, and sigh deeply. Less important than how far you’ve come, to old friends, is how far you haven’t come — and also, where you were before you got old. The fundamental importance of old friendships, plus that peculiar flavor of shared, comfy nastiness that bounces around between old friends — these make up the soft center of “Men of a Certain Age.” We grow old, we fail, we reproach the gods and grimace in pain, and then we meet to eat pie and complain at the same diner each week.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, don’t give up on your dream, Terry!’” Terry (Scott Bakula) tells lifelong friends Joe (Ray Romano) and Owen (Andre Braugher) of his acting career. “What would’ve been so bad if I had, huh? We’re at this place in our lives, we’ve come all this way, and I’ve got nothing to show for it. You’ve got something — families, careers …”

“Families suck,” Joe replies. This harshness, which of course we don’t expect and don’t believe entirely (even from a divorced guy with an anxious teen son and a moody teen daughter), is what balances out the vulnerability of “Men of a Certain Age.” As hand-holdy as the talk can get, these guys are still just guys.

And if you think their confessional, supportive tone with each other comes out of left field, tell that to the wood fence contractor who volunteered to me last week that he’d been “journaling a lot” about his dad’s death, or the plumber who, apropos of nothing, discussed the struggles of raising teenagers. Middle-aged strangers tell each other emotional stuff out of the blue, and middle-aged friends tell each other everything. (The only exception may be certain varieties of hipster intellectual, who could literally chat about Sufjan Stevens’ latest album on their deathbeds instead of confessing the hopes, fears and regrets of their final hours.)

But the utter lack of hipness of “Men of a Certain Age,” the total lack of concern for what’s deemed cool and what isn’t, the complete disregard for matching the breakneck pace, the action, the swooning romances, the spitty outbursts, the shiny thrills of other TV shows, is exactly what makes this drama so lovable. Where other dramas would pack in more zaniness and intrigue in every available second of airtime, “Men of a Certain Age” rolls out the familiar, the ordinary, and locates poetic folds and sweet pockets of emotion therein: Joe’s employees are two pure-intentioned teenagers who are genuinely confused by his old-guy ways, and one slow-moving old Spanish-speaking guy, Carlos, who sleeps on the job but Joe still can’t stand to fire him (he lays him off then hires him back at the end of the first season). Owen works at a car dealership owned by his dad, a thoroughly mundane job that Owen dislikes most of the time, but also occasionally excels at. When he breaks away to work for another dealership at the start of the second season, his father is angry, but his respect and investment in his son finally start to emerge out of the fog of his constant hectoring. Even Terry, with his acting career, has encounters with the film industry that will strike anyone who’s actually worked production as hauntingly authentic, less focused as they are on stars and perks and glamour than on a steady flow of deeply humiliating interactions with the most unsavory sorts of egomaniacs imaginable. The big promises and untrustworthy allegiances Terry forms with one director (who refers to him, tellingly, as “T-bag”), only to have the rug pulled out from under him on a whim, echo some essential Hollywood experience that’s rarely portrayed with quite as much clarity and empathy.

But the big impact of this drama comes in its quietest moments: Joe and his son, Albert (Braedon Lemasters), are driving home from the movie theater after Albert has had an anxiety attack and insists that they leave. Suddenly, Albert wants to know if Joe is embarrassed by him. “Embarrassed? No, man. Never,” Joe says, his eyes starting to well up a little. “You’re my hero. I mean that. You’re doing great, man. I’m proud of you.” It’s simple dialogue, nothing fancy, nothing too clever or provocative, but that’s what gets you in the throat sometimes.

Like the oldish and crumpled and vaguely resentful among us, “Men of a Certain Age” casts aside sophistication and witty banter for the comfort of what’s real — even when what’s real is disappointments, missed connections and inadequate attempts to reassure. In accepting our frailty, we locate our souls.

You’re doing great, “Men of a Certain Age.” We’re proud of you.

Oh, and have a great weekend! 

The answer to that question, of course, is zero. Or as Lebowitz herself puts it when speaking to a roomful of young people, “There are too many books, the books are terrible, and it’s because you have been taught to have self-esteem.” This is Lebowitz’s distinct talent: making elitist contempt sound charming.

Toni Morrison, a friend of Lebowitz’s, puts it a little differently. “You seem to me almost always right,” she tells Lebowitz. “But never fair.”

“That’s why,” Lebowitz responds. “I’m always right because I’m never fair.”

Most of us secretly wish that we could be as right and as unfair as she is. But the world has changed a lot since “Metropolitan Life” was first published in 1974. Being unfair isn’t nearly as acceptable as it used to be. Today, people demand prose that is polite, respectful, nonjudgmental, and that never employs terms, phrases, suggestions or hints that could offend any segment of the population. People demand prose that isn’t prose, in other words.

Contrast that with almost any assertion made by Lebowitz in “Metropolitan Life” or “Social Studies”: Jews make good stand-up comedians. Sports are “dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.” Communism is unpleasant because “I do not work well with others and I do not wish to learn to do so.” Children “tend to be sticky” and “respond inadequately to sardonic humor and veiled threats.”

“Public Speaking” (premieres 10 p.m. Monday, Nov. 22, on HBO) is also packed with Lebowitz’s clever observations, the most gratifying of which may be her reflections on the ways our culture has changed since her books were first published. “An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists. That audience died in five minutes,” she says, referring to the AIDS epidemic. These days, Lebowitz says, “everything has to be broader, more blatant, more on the nose.” The problem? “Too much democracy in the culture, not enough democracy in the society.”

Lebowitz’s real strength, though, lies in explaining the different social classes to each other, either in her books or in Scorsese’s film. In “Social Studies” she includes a “Glossary of Words Used By Poorer People” including meatloaf (“A gloriously rough kind of pate”) and overworked (“an overwhelming feeling of fatigue, exhaustion, weariness. Similar to jet lag”), and outlines the trivializing effects of the international jet-setter (“What, after all, is London to a man who thinks of the whole Middle East as just another bad neighborhood and the coast of South Africa as simply the beach?”).

In “Public Speaking,” it’s clear that, although Lebowitz might mingle with elites, her underlying affections lie with the common man — as unsuitable as she might find his pants or his penchant for installing wall-to-wall carpeting in bathrooms. When the topic of how New York City has changed over the past two decades arises, Lebowitz says, “When a place is too expensive, only people with lots of money can live there. That’s the problem. You can like people with money, hate people with money. But you cannot say that an entire city with people with lots of money is fascinating. It isn’t.”

Even if her writers block continues for another three decades, Lebowitz herself remains undeniably fascinating. Scorsese’s documentary offers us a long overdue taste of her unique, queasily accurate perspectives on our culture — always right, never fair and never disappointing.