Where to Stream: BoJack Horseman

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I can’t pinpoint exactly when I realized how brilliant BoJack Horseman is, but it certainly took me by surprise. I needed a show to occupy my time while I second-screened with my iPad in my lap (I like to play Monopoly while I absent-mindedly watch TV), and I figured that an animated series about a washed-up horse actor living (or trying to live, anyway) in Hollywood would be the perfect thing to set up as background noise. Soon, however, I realized that BoJack Horseman is not the kind of animated sitcom you can just leave on and idly pay attention to. In fact, it’s not a sitcom at all, but rather an emotionally gripping cable-style dramedy that dishes out more heartfelt and heartbreaking moments as it does laugh-out-loud comedic gags and Hollywood satire.

The show stars out like your typical ridiculous animated comedy, imagining a Hollywood (and a world) populated by humans and anthropomorphic animals, some of whom work in the entertainment industry. BoJack, the erstwhile star of the family sitcom Horsin’ Around (voiced by Will Arnett), is a Hollywood has-been who’s struggling to get work and to write his memoirs. He spends his time wasting away (and getting wasted, even if he attests that it takes him a long time to get drunk since he weights 1,200 pounds) with his companion Todd (Aaron Paul), who has been living on his couch for the past five years. His sometimes girlfriend and agent, Princess Caroline (a pink cat voiced by Amy Sedaris), tries her best to get him acting gigs, but nearly two decades of fucking around has left him almost unemployable.

The elements of Hollywood satire unfold almost immediately, with Alison Brie playing a writer named Diane Nguyen tasked with ghostwriting BoJack’s memoirs. Kristen Schaal appears early in the series as the starlet and recording star Sarah Lynn, who played one of the orphaned kids BoJack’s character adopted on his early ’90s sitcom. In the present day she’s a drug-addicted mess, reminiscent of a more notorious version of Lindsay Lohan, and a wake-up call for BoJack, who realizes that he’s possibly led astray the young girl who once considered him a parental figure. Things get deeper when BoJack attempts to make amends with Herb Kazzaz, the creator of Horsin’ Around who BoJack abandoned when a sex scandal revealed he was gay; Herb, now dying of prostate cancer, refuses to accept BoJack’s efforts at apology, marking the first time in the series that the show goes to unexpectedly, yet incredibly realistic, places.

BoJack Horseman is not your typical animated comedy; it appreciates the absurd, self-referential comedy of its contemporary animated (and live-action) TV series, but it also delves deep into the dark side of the human psyche — although it sometimes presents it, of course, through the avatar of a horse. And while it does have it’s hilarious moments, its most surprising and affecting elements come from the sharp storytelling that doesn’t avoid the uncomfortable truths of the world. As creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg recently said in an interview with The Verge:

My thought was that I’m going to assemble a room of very funny comedy writers, and we’re not gonna talk about jokes as much. We’re going to talk about story, and I’m thinking that in the writing it’ll be funny, because we’ve worked those muscles. We know how to be funny, we know how to punch up a script, we know how to add jokes. But I’m not interested in being funny for the sake of funny. We’re not just making jokes so that we can make jokes. I’m more interested in what are the characters going through.

That storytelling — and its surprising importance — is what makes BoJack Horseman the best original series Netflix has produced. With the third seasons of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black veering into soap opera territory, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and the recently released Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp focusing more on the absurd, BoJack Horseman rests firmly in the middle, equally balancing the comic and drama of the human experience. And that it does so through the eyes of a anthropomorphic horse is part of what makes it brilliant and incredibly watchable. In any other live-action dramedy, BoJack would be, let’s face it, a straight white guy. We see their problems examined so often on film and television that we’ve begun to grow tired of it, desperate for more diverse looking casts without considering the thematic heft we hope (and assume) will come along with it. What makes BoJack Horseman so brilliant is not just that it tricks its audience into watching a thoughtful examination on human emotion disguised as your average cartoon. It also allows those emotions to transcend the image of who is feeling them, truly making the character at the center of the scene (whether it be BoJack, Todd, Diane, or Princess Caroline) a stand-in for all of us.

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Photos: Everett Collection