How BoJack Horseman became a surprise, heartbreaking hit
BoJack Horseman has blossomed over the past five years from an unoriginal entertainment satire into something far richer and more profound. It has gradually freed itself of its own constraints, organically transforming into a sweet, surreal meditation on sadness, regret and the promise of redemption that lingers tantalisingly out of reach. Every new season nudged it into a new and even more unexpected space, winning yet more critical adoration with each giant step.
And then, blammo. Netflix blasts it out of the sky, thinking perhaps that a long-running show will draw fewer new subscribers than a splashy new one. At least that’s according to Aaron Paul, who reacted to BoJack Horseman’s
cancellation by tweeting: “Netflix thought it was time to close the curtains and so here we are. They gave us a home for 6 beautiful years. Nothing we could do about it”. But with more dignity than it afforded The OA, Netflix has had the grace to give BoJack one final season. This is thoughtful in theory, except this approach hasn’t exactly produced the best results in the past. Think of the painful, incomprehensible final season of House of Cards. Think how Orange is the New Black drifted off into a fog of unheralded irrelevance. Remember Bloodline’s final season? Remember Bloodline at all?
Still, BoJack Horseman differs to those shows in one important way, which is that it will be going out on a high. Even for a show that produced the heartbreaking, almost dialogue-free episode Fish Out of Water, BoJack surpassed itself last series. When the time comes to look back at the show’s highlights, season five was arguably the strongest series yet.
Take Free Churro, which took the form of an episode-long monologue as BoJack delivered a rollercoaster of a eulogy to his mother. Or The Showstopper, an exploration of the consequences of addiction as hard-hitting as any drama. In The Dog Days Are Over, the show confronted itself in a surprisingly direct way about its casting of Alison Brie as a Vietnamese character. In The Stopped Shoe, it sidestepped an opportunity for a happy ending and veered off into much more ambiguous territory. Season five of BoJack Horseman wasn’t just a show that had found