There’s an episode of South Park where the town is shocked to hear that rival cartoon Family Guy are planning to show an image of the prophet Mohammed in their next episode. Cartman sets off to the studio to get the show shut down – not because he respects Islam or fears terror attacks, but simply because he dislikes the programme’s writing style. In an angry tirade he declares:
Do you have any idea what it’s like? Everywhere I go, ‘Hey Cartman, you must like Family Guy, right?’ ‘Hey, your sense of humor reminds me of Family Guy, Cartman.’ I am NOTHING like Family Guy! When I make jokes, they are inherent to a story! Deep, situational and emotional jokes based on what is relevant and has a POINT! Not just one interchangeable joke after another!
When al-Qaeda threaten retaliation, their spokesman criticises Family Guy in much the same tones that Cartman does. ‘Family Guy isn’t even that well written,’ says a scary-looking terror boss. ‘The jokes are interchangeable and usually irrelevant to the plot.’
Both these criticisms was South Park’s way of saying that the animation genre was running out of steam. We all remember watching Simpsons on BBC2 in the evenings but now this type of thing doesn’t have the same impact – although I still get belly laughs from Archer, King of the Hill and South Park.
Yet something different is happening with Bojack Horseman. It’s about a lazy, irresponsible Hollywood celebrity who drinks too much and just doesn’t care, the first few episodes are clever and funny but predictable, but around halfway through season one you start noticing things.
One aspect critics picked up on was the show’s eerie prescience. The 2017 Oscars farce when Faye Dunaway read off the wrong name mirrored a previous episode in which Bojack’s friend Mr Peanutbutter the celebrity dog is supposed to host the Oscars but he loses the list of winners and simply makes them up, getting several wrong. And the episode ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ underscored America’s acclimatisation to horrific gun violence to the extent that the phrase – perfunctorily reiterated by J K Simmons’s weathered film exec Lenny Turtletaub whenever a shooting occurred – has become shorthand for ineffective symbolic gestures in the face of preventable atrocities. (The line is even used in Don Winslow’s The Border when the bad guys are planning out the aftermath of a targeted assassination.)
There’s plenty more subtle stuff going on in the background. Bojack’s Hollywood is a city of man and beast, but the animals aren’t just humanised animals. They act like real animals. A woodpecker drills through his restaurant table, debutante horses dressage through a tony ballroom, and Bojack even helps a male seahorse give birth (‘yes, it’s a thing!’) Guest characters from one episode recur and recur through the series, glimpsed on sets and at parties: Lisa Hanawalt’s deft busy scenes ensure that we care about the little people in Bojack’s life even though Bojack never does.
Upfront is Bojack’s psychodrama and it doesn’t take long for the show to uncover his own formative demons. Bojack’s father was an narcissist, alcoholic and failed author, who like all narcissists rejects his son because he will never provide the true reflecting pool of himself that the narcissist craves. (The dad Butterscotch has a brilliant toxic masculine death – he’s killed in a duel with a book reviewer who criticised Butterscotch’s only published novel.) With no positive male influence to lean on, the boy Bojack becomes a huge fan of Secretariat – in this world, another hybrid celebrity horse. There is a moving scene, written from different angles over two episodes, where Secretariat in a chat show appearance reads out a letter from then nine year old Bojack and gives some advice on how Bojack can make his way in the world. But Bojack never hears of what Secretariat has to say because his parents start one of their predictable arguments and drown out the TV with yelling. Secretariat himself commits suicide soon afterward.
Bojack has come a long way since childhood – he has got rich from silly 1990s sitcom ‘Horsin’ Around’, he has a luxury home in the hills, while he doesn’t have a wife or family he can find sex and companionship any time he wants it. As Mr Peanutbutter says – in a rare moment of fury – ‘What more do you want? What else could the universe possibly owe you?’ In the first episode Bojack starts having panic attacks, and a doctor tells him to take it easy. To Bojack’s agent Princess Carolyn this advice is meaningless – Bojack does nothing but take it easy. So what’s causing the attacks? Bojack is in his fifties but doesn’t seem to fear old age or death, it’s not that he’s ashamed of the stupid commercial hit that made his name, in fact he’s proud of it, he feels that he delivered a great escapist comedy that would make people laugh and forget their aches and cares for a while. It often seems that Bojack is looking for that uncomplicated and predictable happiness of a half-hour’s good television.
Midway through the show develops its central theme of masculinity and its consequences. Bojack does a film tribute to his male role model Secretariat then moves on to a hardboiled cop show written – in a brilliant sendup of the auteur showrunner – by the obnoxious and self obsessed Flip McVicker. As Bojack goes on he accumulates more and more ghosts: the people he’s let down start to haunt his present, from the Horsin’ Around mentor who died of cancer to the ex colleague Sarah Lynn who overdosed on heroin under his care. Bojack is masculine but not toxic, even when he’s an asshole he’s warm and entertaining to be around, but as the show incorporated the real life MeToo events you’re constantly on edge for Bojack’s own reckoning.
One thing creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg empathised in the show was the importance of personal responsibility. At the end of season three Bojack’s sidekick Todd – voiced by Aaron ‘Pinkman’ Paul – finally tires of Bojack’s selfishness and rants:
You can’t keep doing this! You can’t keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself as if that makes it okay! You need to be better!
No! No, BoJack, just… Stop. You are all the things that are wrong with you. It’s not the alcohol, or the drugs, or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career or when you were a kid. It’s you. Alright? It’s you.
Neither of them speak for a moment, and we’re taking in the trashed apartment, the words that can’t be taken back, and Todd adds: ‘Fuck, man…What else is there to say?’ Credits roll on a scene just as powerful as Paul ever did with Bryan Cranston, if not more.
All this is heavy going for a cartoon, and there’s times you think you’re in a graphic novel written by John Cheever, even F Scott Fitzgerald. The novel has abandoned this whole subject of life and death and happiness and responsibility, but apparently we still want to see it on TV, in particular a TV show about a talking horse.
Numerous episodes take the form of hallucinations experienced by characters in the throes of a drug binge or mental degeneration, and there is one – screening this weekend, if you’ve seen it you’ll know – that happens in purgatory. The cold tragedy of these moments can be a hard watch. Perhaps better than other artists, the comic animator has the skill to portray the finality of things broken that won’t be fixed, things done and said that can’t be undone or taken back, and the terrifying separation between human beings.
As against that there’s a warmth and essential goodness to the show, expressed in the wonderful set piece episodes: the comic funeral eulogy of ‘Free Churro,’ the quiz battle ‘Let’s Find Out,’ the multiple Halloween narratives of ‘Mr Peanutbutter’s Boos’ and the underwater odyssey of ‘Fish Out of Water’. All of it makes this a programme its hapless hero would love to have created – something that makes us laugh and forget our cares, even as it tells us how hard it is to be a horse, and a man.
Max Dunbar 
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