scumbelievable
patreon
Thanks, I Hate It: BoJack Horseman
🕑 Added 2019-11-01 14:00:06 +0000 UTCLisa Hanawalt's gorgeously idiosyncratic world of loose-limbed people and anthropomorphic animal weirdos, Kristin Schaal's whining, matter-of-factly self-destructive voice performance as washed-up sitcom actress Sarah Lynn, a writer's room smart and inventive enough to spin goofy animal puns into everything from wry one-liners to extended pitch-black comedy bits; there's so much talent underlying BoJack Horseman. It makes the show's fundamental structural fault -- that its comedic and dramatic elements fatally undercut one another -- that much more infuriating.
BoJack Horseman, like all sitcoms, doesn't really have characters. Sure its players have recognizable and more or less consistent traits (Diane and Princess Carolyn never really become coherent), but the nature of the show means they're more joke delivery mechanisms than people. This wouldn't be a problem if the show weren't dead set on pushing regularly into Very Serious Issues. These dramatic shifts -- child molestation, death by overdose, a lobotomy -- are shot through with and surrounded by wacky, inorganic jokes which make the dramatic material feel unmoored from the fiction. It's not that you can't wed misery and humor (Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad all did so regularly), it's that BoJack's brand of funny is so self-consciously constructed that it renders more serious storytelling impossible to really feel.
The traumatic lobotomization of BoJack's grandmother serves best to illustrate the above point. It's a frightening piece of backstory, one that destroy's BoJack's mother's life and heavily influences his own in ways of which he's unaware, but it's communicated in such a glib, chirpy way that it has no bite to it. The characters of BoJack's grandmother and grandfather are cardboard cutouts and his mother isn't much better, her abusive behavior presented as a broad series of psychologically inert jokes. Nowhere in her personality is there any trace of this memory of her own mother's mutilation which we're so clearly expected to believe shaped her entire way of being. It's sloppy writing, a collage of rotten life events with no personal tissue to connect them.
The whole show is riddled with this kind of non-storytelling, from Diane's marriage to the grating Paul F. Tompkin's-voiced Mr. Peanut Butter, an anthropomorphic golden lab to Princess Caroline's aimless career hopping. The plots centered on Aaron Paul's Todd are especially out to sea, devoid of any and all relatable human qualities or cohesion. The show's didactic approach to discussing depression is another mark against it. Characters take time out to monologue about their unhappiness and feelings of despair and self-loathing in the blandest, most Psych 101 way imaginable, reducing the human condition to shopworn Chicken Soup for the Soul-esque koans. BoJack's occasional dim flashes of insight can't make up for its endless cycling through the same four hours of self-pitying dreck.
Comments
Gretchen Felker-Martin
I definitely found it appealing at first, when I was very, very sick, and for similar reasons!
Briar Ripley Page
Looking back from a mentally healthier place, though? The emotional manipulation is REALLY hacky, and I'm sort of embarrassed I was so affected by it. I also think the lecturing tone is...probably not the best thing for people struggling with mood disorders, trauma, and addiction, actually; most of us are (as mentioned) ALREADY self-loathing; the show seems to posit that what we need is more tough love and other people willing to tell us how bad we suck, and I don't think that's true. I quit watching after the...4th? season, I think, and I really have no desire to revisit the show as a mentally healthier person.
Briar Ripley Page
I enjoyed Bojack, clumsy bathos and all, when I was going through an extremely bad time circa 2017. It does have the good points you mention (I WISH more modern animated shows had this kind of playful, unique, slightly grotesque approach to setting and character design), but at the time I appreciated the tragedy porn aspect, too. I think the "you need to try harder to not be a total piece of shit" individualist therapy-speak stuff was both semi-helpful to me as someone prone to fatalistic and black & white thinking, and satisfying in the way that any message which reinforces your self-loathing and self-recrimination is satisfying when you're very depressed.
