Netflix’s mane appeal
With so much happening, BoJack Horseman is perfect for a big gulp audience
The quintessential BoJack Horseman character is Vincent Adultman, the sometime boyfriend of BoJack’s hard-charging feline agent Princess Caroline, and very clearly three children stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat. His squeaky voice and one hand that’s actually a broom don’t deter Caroline, probably because, though he spends a lot of time on his business transactions, he’s also capable of some pretty piercing insights into her lingering loneliness.
As a show, Netflix’s BoJack Horseman is a similar kind of maximalist Frankenstein monster; it’s a show that’s not so much unclassifiable as excessively classifiable: a bleak exploration of middle-aged ennui sitting on the shoulders of a showbiz satire, shoving animal puns through its left sleeve and grasping at sitcom-y shenanigans with its right hand. There might not be another show, comedy or otherwise, that tries to stuff quite so much into itself, let alone one that’s figured out how to make each one of its wildly disparate tones land.
The surprise of first season was that a show that seemed to be some combination of a cheap joke at ‘ 90s nostalgia and Will Arnett playing Gob Bluth as a cartoon horse turned out to be so overwhelmingly bleak. Far beyond a faded sitcom star — or maybe just much deeper into that trope — Bojack turned out to be a horse with a relentless void at the centre of his soul, one that had been gilded and deepened with money and fame. The “Horseman” part of his name ended up being indicative of how the show pulled between poles, freely indulging in the pure silliness of the idea of anthropomorphic animals (and, for that matter, Hollywood) and drilling into the horrifying insecurities that, when unchecked, can eat any person alive.
BoJack’s second season features nothing quite so discombobulating as the initial reveal of just how deep his depression extended, but it builds on the wild dichotomy of the first, pushing its edges even further. A perfect example might be Princess Caroline and Vincent Adultman’s break-up: when she catches him out of costume, he assumes that her obviously adult boyfriend is hiding a secret family.
Their fight about it is a parade of self-consciously hacky double-identity tropes, Vincent using newspapers and bowling balls to obscure his face while his “child” proves they are very much two different people; it ends, though, with a reasonably gutting break-up. Princess Caroline goes back to the solitude to which she is more or less consigned. Each of these things bend back and reinforce each other, too, the wackiness ultimately explained by Caroline’s underlying desperation, the desperation given an extra tinge of poignancy for the sheer ridiculousness of the relationship.
Not everything in the show dovetails quite this elegantly, but there’s still something remarkable in the way BoJack drills so thoroughly into every bit of itself, doesn’t really let anything sit as a throwaway gag: even the most pure throwaway gags, which mostly involve animal puns or twists on anthropomorphic behaviour (Princess Caroline’s condo includes a kitty condo complete with scratching post and ball to bat, for instance), get tweaked this season with an episode that explores the difference between “friend” chickens and “food” chickens.
Later in the season, BoJack’s housemate Todd joins an improv group that turns out to be a Scientology cult — but even all of that is ultimately just his way of dealing with being abandoned by BoJack, who sinks back into a torpor after breaking up with his girlfriend and nearly sleeping with the teenaged daughter of his long-ago crush. His rescue is another genuine emotional moment, and the whole escapade ends up being maybe the mostly tightly braided excuse for butt jokes ever streamed.
True to form, even the fact BoJack is streaming, and not airing, feels like something that was essentially considered by Rapheal Bob-Waksburg, the show’s creator. There’s been some hand-wringing around the shotgun-blast model of Netflix and its fellow streamers, specifically with the way it’s encouraged some creators to adopt a pretty laissez-faire method of storytelling, or at least one that tends to ignore well-timed hooks in favour of back-end weight (the first season of BoJack didn’t entirely avoid that trap). BoJack offers another potential option for streaming shows, one that doesn’t have to limit itself to one tone or idea for the sake of clarity: it knows its audience can devour it in big gulps, which gives the show ample chance to prove how its odd flights of fancy connect to the deeper ideas at it’s core.
Streaming, like most Internetbased mediums, is a place that’s ideally suited to maximalism; it seems oddly appropriate that a cartoon horse with depression should be one of the first things to exploit that.