BoJack Horseman
An alcoholic horse is an alcoholic horse, of course, of course...
The first episode of Netflix’s new animated series BoJack Horseman opens with the show’s
namesake, anthropomorphized horse and washed up 90s TV star BoJack Horseman
(Will Arnett), being interviewed by Charlie Rose about what he’s been up to in
the 18 years since his enormously successful family sitcom Horsin’ Around went off the air. BoJack, who by his own admission
is “incredibly drunk”, has this to
say when asked about his commercially successful but critically
reviled show:
“Look, for a lot of
people life is just one long, hard kick in the urethra. And sometimes, when you
get home from a long day of getting kicked in the urethra, you just want to
watch a show about good, likable people who love each other. Where, y’know, no
matter what happens, at the end of 30 minutes, everything’s gonna turn out
okay.”
The Hollywood BoJack Horseman lives in is populated by both
humans and anthropomorphized animals who mostly behave like humans (driving
cars, drinking lattes, hating themselves), although their animal side shines
through from time to time. BoJack’s no-nonsense agent and sometimes girlfriend,
Princess Caroline (Amy Sedaris), is a pink cat whose corner office is decorated
with a desktop scratching post. BoJack’s professional rival, sitcom star Mr.
Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins), is a relentlessly optimistic golden retriever
who keeps a pile of tennis balls in the trunk of his BMW.
But it’s BoJack who seems to have the most trouble
reconciling his animal side with his human side. He’s a wild stallion who
refuses to be put out to pasture – arrogant, overbearing, deluded and selfish,
constantly drunk and seeking attention, always on the lookout for a new groupie
to bang. Over the years this behavior has alienated nearly everyone around him
save for Todd (Aaron Paul), a (human) stoner who wandered into one of BoJack’s
parties five years ago and has been sleeping on his couch ever since.
BoJack is struggling to write a tell-all autobiography
intended to make America love him again, and in the first episode his editor at
Penguin Publishing (who, naturally, is
a penguin) hires ghostwriter Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie, yes, that Alison Brie) to shadow him and get
the book finished on deadline. Over the course of the 12-episode first season,
hijinx ensue as BoJack tries to set the record straight on his life story and
his legacy.
But the thing that really caught me off guard and made BoJack Horseman one of my favorite TV
shows of the year* was that beneath all the raunchy shenanigans, there’s some serious
emotional weight and resonance to this series. By the end of the season I felt
a real connection to most of the characters – and that’s quite an achievement
when one of the show’s catchphrases is “Eat
a dick, dumbshits!”
*The opening title sequence deserves some credit too.
So many popular TV comedies seem to be centered around a man
who behaves like a child and the trouble everybody around him goes through
trying to clean up his messes – Family
Guy, Home Improvement, The Cleveland Show, The Simpsons, American Dad, Married
With Children, Two and a Half Men, Eastbound
and Down, and so on. Strictly speaking, that’s not a bad thing. But still,
every week on Family Guy you know
Peter Griffin is going to create some disaster that his entire family will have
to set right – and you know that next week they’ll still be there waiting for
him to do it again.
The first few episodes of BoJack Horseman follow that standard sitcom formula. BoJack insults
a Navy SEAL (who, naturally, is a
seal) on TV, causing a national controversy that his friends have to solve.
BoJack lets a Lohanesque former costar stay at his house, forcing his friends
to intervene before her hard-partying lifestyle brings them both down. BoJack
goes to comical lengths to torpedo one of his friends’ lifelong dreams because
he doesn’t want him to get too busy to hang out.
But just shy of the halfway point of the season, it starts
to become clear that this isn’t a show where, at the end of 30 minutes, everything’s
gonna turn out okay. There’s very strong continuity between episodes – BoJack’s
ottoman remains charred throughout the season after being lit on fire in an
early episode, an LA landmark partially destroyed by BoJack on a drunken bender
stays that way in all subsequent establishing shots, and most importantly,
everybody remembers all the crappy things BoJack has done to them from one
episode to the next.
That’s the genius of BoJack
Horseman – it uses the standard sitcom trope of a boorish, self-destructive
clown, but it actually shows the clown the consequences of his actions. As the
show goes on and BoJack realizes that the world he lives in isn’t as simple and
forgiving as the sitcom world where he made his fortune, he has to try to mend
fences and become a better, more mature person – and because he has no idea how
to do that, the process is as hilarious as it is emotionally involving,
The critics have not been kind to BoJack Horseman – the general consensus is that it’s a stale carbon
copy of Family Guy, American Dad, The
Cleveland Show, and so on. And that’s not a surprise, since most of these
critics watched pre-release screeners from Netflix with only the first couple
of episodes on them. If you went to write a review of a magic show but left
before the magician pulled the rabbit out of the hat, you’d probably be a neighsayer too.
Truman Capps can only imagine how enthusiastic
furries must be about this show.