** Minor Spoilers follow. I recommend just going ahead and watching this wonderful show if you already haven't **
Superficially BoJack Horseman appears to be a form of lowest-common-denominator television: crass, cheap, disposable. It’s the farthest thing from that though. Sure, it’s yet another adult animated show with shades of the stoner humor and casual surrealness of Adult Swim and more recent animated Fox programming. The series is set in a world with anthropomorphized animals inexplicably right alongside humans. The show is also a fairly conspicuous Hollywood satire. In its second season, the show watches as its protagonist’s dream project, a film adaptation of the life of Secretariat, slowly gets ruined by Hollywood corporatism.
The series certainly has these elements to it, but it’s also
a subtle, devastating psychological drama. The series strikes a delicate tonal
balance that it has perfected in its second season. Moments of loony humor are
followed by moments of bone-deep melancholy without either detracting from or
feeling at odds with the other. The sillier moments feed into the sadder,
darker moments by placing the latter in stark contrast. And some of the
seemingly goofier things are almost entirely or simultaneously depressing upon
second thought.
The show centers on a washed-up former sitcom star BoJack
Horseman (Will Arnett). The first season found BoJack in a deep, intractable
period of malaise. The show wanted us to initially attribute this dissatisfaction
to his empty celebrity lifestyle. It became clear, however, that this was just
a surface-level cause of BoJack’s issues and that their root causes stemmed
even further back.
Give or take the recently departed Mad Men, BoJack Horseman
is the most psychologically acute show on television. It takes as its primary
focus the subject of clinical depression. BoJack has it pretty severely, but a number
of other characters live with it to differing degrees, including Diane (Alison
Brie). BoJack hired Diane last season to
ghostwrite his biography and she now struggles to not feel trapped in her
relatively stable marriage with the dog and former, well-adjusted sitcom star
Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins).
The show observes its characters as they fall into
unhealthy, self-destructive patterns. They are prone to self-sabotage and
rarely willing to take the necessary, hard-earned incremental steps towards change that go
along with coming to terms with your shortcomings and problems. The show does this to
allow for humorous shenanigans, but the series always pulls back to understand
the pathology driving these behaviors. The series gets that the characters are
attempting to believe that their dissatisfaction is situational rather than innate.
Deep down they don’t truly believe that, but it’s always easier to pretend to believe
this than to fundamentally change. In the great penultimate season two episode
“Escape from L.A.”, BoJack flees California for New Mexico on a whim to escape
his problems, but he ultimately finds himself just as unhappy and unfulfilled
as before. He returns home having wrecked a path of internal and external
damage in his wake.
BoJack is constantly facing an impenetrable feeling of
ennui. He’s a broken man (uh, horseman), who finds one new distraction after
another to avoid dealing with his inescapable lack of happiness. In the process,
BoJack keeps hurting everyone around him. He tentatively starts a relationship
with Wanda Pierce (Lisa Kudrow), an owl and tv network executive who woke up
from a thirty year coma and found that she was able to keep doing her job
as if nothing happened. But BoJack finds ways to intentionally let the
relationship implode. When given an opportunity to repair the relationship, he
instead pursues an ex-girlfriend who’s now married. When he becomes frustrated
with his latest acting job, he simply decides to stop going to set, much to the
anger of his agent the cat Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris). BoJack lets his
friendship with his lovable lay-about roommate Todd (Aaron Paul) slowly
deteriorate through neglect. Of course, in this universe that means that Todd
is snatched up by an insidious cult built around improv comedy. But the
emotional climax where the two reconcile is strangely beautiful and moving.
The show’s animation is consistently gorgeous at conveying
this. There’s at least one moment in each episode that’s cut through with
overwhelming wistfulness and longing, and that the show underlines less through
dialogue than beautiful, poignant images. Each episode is visually ornate.
There’s a density to the imagery that recalls early episodes of The Simpsons. Much of the humor can be found in tossed away visual
jokes, from billboards and posters and characters in the background, crowding
the margins of each episode. The series makes effective use of the Netflix
binge-watching model in order to consciously utilize continuity to build jokes
as well as emotional and character arcs across the season.
This is a very funny show, and also a very weird one. But
it’s also a show with moments that are strikingly profound and tragic. It will
having you laughing, but it will also blindside you. These might be cartoon
characters, but they have souls. They’re fragile and broken, and they’re still
picking up the pieces. They’re oddly a lot like us.
