BoJack Breakdowns: Season 1, Episodes 1-2
Establishing how BoJack Horseman differs from other adult animated shows
“Most people don’t even get to do the Brady Bunch version of the thing they want to do with their lives.” ~Diane Nguyen
The show follows BoJack Horseman (voiced by Will Arnett), an actor who had a popular ‘90’s sitcom called Horsin’ Around (think Full House). Since the show ended, he has done very little but live tenuously with his substance abuse and a string of meaningless sexual partners. He has a housemate Todd (voiced by Aaron Paul) who sleeps on his couch and is just into mischief.
BoJack is trying to write a memoir, but his ability to actually focus enough to write it is hampered by the aforementioned drugs and sex. His agent Princess Caroline (voiced by Amy Sedaris) advises him to hire a ghostwriter, and he reluctantly follows her counsel, bringing in Diane Nguyen (voiced by Alison Brie) to write his book. She just happens to be dating Mr. Peanutbutter (voiced by Paul F. Tompkins), BoJack’s longtime acting rival who was in a show that was a direct competition to Horsin’ Around.
My kids are the ones who convinced me to watch BoJack Horseman. I had started it before, but had a hard time getting into it, probably because I wasn’t quite sure what it was trying to do. He’s a horse, but he has hands? There are animals that have a lot of animal traits, but also get with regular humans? And there are some animals that aren’t sentient and are used for food?
Add to that, the show is listed as “adult animation” and that has a very specific kind of vibe to me, mostly along the lines of South Park or Family Guy, the kind of edgelord fare that rose to prominence in the early 2000’s and still somehow persists. And early BoJack seems to have some of that on its face. BoJack is a loathsome character, and he is surrounded by a lot of people who enable him.
But unlike other shows, I don’t think we’re ever supposed to feel any kind of sympathy for BoJack. He has all of the traits that we love/hate in someone like Peter Griffin or Cartman, but rather than being completely unaware of how his actions affect others, he becomes aware after the fact - not self-aware enough to stop his bad behavior, but aware enough to see it later and heap self-loathing on top of the awareness. He’s not stupid, he’s just privileged and wealthy enough to not give much thought to his actions before he does them. And then after the fact, there’s no one that he can apologize to.
Except that early on, we find that sometimes there are people available to accept an apology and he doesn’t do it anyway. In episode 2, “BoJack Hates the Troops,” BoJack gets into an argument with a Navy SEAL when he picks up a dozen muffins that were left in the produce section of the supermarket. It turns into a huge news spectacle, which is some biting satire about the state of 24 hour news, and that the anchor is voiced by Keith Olbermann, is somewhere between hilarious and brilliant - I honestly don’t know which.
When BoJack finds the muffins, he buys them and eats them all just to spite the man who claimed to have dibs on them, despite feeling terrible about it. When it turns out that he took them from a serviceman, BoJack goes on the program to defend himself and says that simply being a member of the military doesn’t automatically make someone a good person, it gets turned into a story that BoJack hates the troops. The many (!!!) animal puns throughout the episode make it silly and funny, but it also does a shockingly good job of highlighting our interest in manufactured outrage rather than actual news or even honest discourse about cultural issues.
Critics were also not sure what to do with BoJack Horseman. When you watch early episodes in the context of the whole show, they are brilliantly constructed to point to where the rest of the show is going, but those same episodes have lower ratings overall, not coming close to the critical acclaim that it would have by season 4. But all of the pieces are there from the start.
But when I think about the first few episodes, I think about the line that I quoted at the top of the piece from episode 1. BoJack seems embarrassed that his fame is from a cheesy 90’s sitcom. In an interview he does with Charlie Rose in the opening moments of the show, he says that Horsin’ Around wasn’t Ibsen, but it was something nice and sometimes people just want something nice. But he also knows that it was goofy and he will only be remembered for a silly show and never for any performances of note and he kind of hates that for himself.
When he meets Diane at a party and she compliments his home, he says, “Well, if you’re gonna throw away most of your adult life on some dumb sitcom, you might as well get a sweet house out of the deal, right?” And right there we see a hint of the despair BoJack feels about not doing something important with his life.
Diane then talks to him about “the dad on the Brady Bunch.” Robert Reed famously hated that job because he was a real actor and felt that it was all beneath him. And then she says, “Most people don’t even get to do the Brady Bunch version of the thing they want to do with their lives.” And that line won’t get out of my brain.
One of the many themes in BoJack Horseman is discontentment. It comes back over and over with all of the characters. And yet right in the first episode there is the reminder that there is so much to be grateful for.
I didn’t start as an entertainment writer. This isn’t where I thought my journey would take me and sometimes I feel like I should be doing more Important Writing. But ultimately, I’m lucky to be able to write at all, and to be paid for it is luckier still. And I like doing it. And as much as BoJack spends time denigrating the work he did on Horsin’ Around, we see him rewatching episodes, having the theme as his ringtone, and talking about the show to anyone who will listen. Because it meant a lot to him and he liked doing it. It might be the Brady Bunch version of his life, but that is still a gift.