‘Someone Who Will Love You’ highly likable
For all the oddball avenues explored in Peak TV, none have so successfully balanced the absurd with the tragic like Raphael BobWaksberg’s “BoJack Horseman.”
On the surface, the Netflix series is the story of a celebrity horse who walks upright, starred in a hit ’80s sitcom and navigates a parallel, at times surreal version of Hollywood as drawn by illustrator Lisa Hanawalt that’s populated by a flawed mix of anthropomorphic animals and humans girded by puns like Fred Seagull, MSNBSea and the Chateau Marmoset. Looking deeper, however, it’s maybe the clearest, most human depiction of depression and addiction ever seen in a half-hour TV comedy that’s not afraid to set aside being funny.
This is the heartfelt and occasionally silly wheelhouse for Bob-Waksberg, who continues to combine both emotions in “Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory,” a collection of short stories and the 34-year-old’s first book.
Some stories, like “Lunch With the Person Who Dumped You” and the bulleted “Lies We Told Each Other (a partial list),” are tragi-comic briefs threaded with biting details that leave a mark, like a flicked jab in a boxing match. The punch hits hardest in “Move Across the Country,” which finds a rushed narrator fleeing their stubborn companion “the Sadness” only to discover its return just as a new life has begun.
“When the Sadness smirks at you and says with a wry insistence that unravels you in an instant, ‘This is the real love story here, buddy, you and me,’ ” BobWaksberg writes, and in a few short pages the story transitions to horror.
Longer stories, like the more elaborately drawn presidential theme park imagined in the first-person narrative of “More of the You That You Already Are,” conjure struggles for connection in grimly surreal alternative realities that recall the probing comic imaginings of George Saunders.
His story “We Men of Science” imagines a university professor charged with protecting a newly invented door to an opposite reality, and his inevitable explorations of alternative versions of himself and his loved ones yield increasingly strange yet affecting results.
The book proves BobWaksberg can conjure many modern miseries beyond those of a talking horse, but not all his ventures pay off so well. “Upand-Comers” struggles under the weight of combining a superhero origin story with a sort of “Behind the Music” document of young rock decadence, and “The Average of All Possible Things” fails to find much exceptional after establishing the middle-ofthe-road nature of its central character, a lawyer rebounding from a bad office affair.
That said, for all its darkness, “Someone Who Will Love You” should be considered a lighter, amusing confection, one whose sweeter sides shine that much brighter with its balance of bitterness.