Netflix/Everett

The Netflix animated series “BoJack Horseman” is a comedy about an anthropomorphic talking horse of the same name. BoJack starred in a family sitcom in the eighties and nineties called “Horsin’ Around”—think “Charles in Charge” crossed with “Full House,” but with a horse—and now lives the dissipated life of a show-biz washout in Los Angeles. “BoJack” is a silly show that is also deeply, unshakably sad.

The premise may sound weird, but it gets weirder: on the show, animals and humans work, live, and sleep together in a matter-of-fact way, though animals retain some of their familiar traits in their otherwise human circumstances: sheep are gardeners who wear clothes but also devour grass clippings; roosters go jogging in the morning, yelling at people to “wake up!”; BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) eats like a horse but then, worried about his waistline, feels terrible about it. BoJack’s roommate is a freeloading human named Todd (Aaron Paul), his agent and former girlfriend is a pink cat named Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), his friendly nemesis is a yellow lab in a V-neck T-shirt named Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins), and his other love interests include the human ghostwriter of his memoir (Alison Brie), an owl who just got out of a thirty-year coma (Lisa Kudrow), and a pretty deer (Olivia Wilde), who lives with her human husband in New Mexico.

“BoJack,” whose second season began streaming in July, has received a good deal of well-deserved praise from critics for the way it blends fast-paced absurdist comedy with unexpected depth. Alan Sepinwall, at HitFix, called it “an unblinking, incredibly empathetic portrait of middle-aged melancholy.” Todd VanDerWerff, at Vox, while comparing it to “Mad Men,” wrote, “It’s a strange, sad trip through the dark underbelly of fame, mixed with some of the most brilliant, caustic social commentary out there.” Rudi Greenberg, of the Washington Post, described it as “an incredibly dark and surprisingly nuanced meditation on depression, fame, family and friendship.”

Given that it stars several talking cartoon animals, the show is indeed surprisingly dark. BoJack is haunted by a childhood spent with mean, alcoholic parents, and he makes terrible, often cruel, decisions. He undercuts his friends, fails to keep even the simplest promises, and sabotages his own career. “I have no self-control, and I hate myself,” he says, in what could be the show’s tagline. Another line of his might work even better: “Everything is garbage, so why bother doing anything?”

Are we having fun yet? In fact, “BoJack” is fun—it is visually inventive and makes eccentric use of the best innovations in contemporary television comedy: finely tuned and obsessively curated throwaway jokes and gags; unexpected allusions to high and low culture; clever continuity and layers of self-reference. It owes obvious debts to “The Larry Sanders Show,” “The Simpsons,” “Arrested Development,” and “30 Rock.”

And while “BoJack” may be, as many writers have argued, remarkable for its insistent bleakness, it is not unique in that regard. Instead, it fits into a rich tradition of TV comedies that are, at heart, about unhappiness, anger, despair, and regret.

Most television comedies confect a generally benevolent world view, in which the characters believe in the central premise of their lives, appear to be the heroes of their more or less happy stories, and accept as basically good the culture in which they live. Think everything from “The Brady Bunch” to “The Cosby Show” to “Friends” to “The Big Bang Theory.” These shows have sad moments, but the plots arc toward cheerfulness, always returning to a baseline in which life is purposeful and full of promise. They may have unhappy characters, but even these provide a kind of negative comic relief—they act as kooky sad sacks, who are led into the light by the already happy people who love them.

But there is another, competing strain in TV comedy, in which the opposites of all of these conditions are true: the characters are frustrated by life, dubious about their own worth, and distrustful, if not outright hostile, toward the world around them. It’s not just that the central characters are misanthropes—television has long had plenty of those, from Archie Bunker to Larry David—but that the shows themselves seem essentially misanthropic.

Consider “Cheers,” which, though not immune to the pull of sentimentality, was ultimately about a group of people who were trapped, both within the physical confines of a Boston bar (whenever they ventured out, things got very silly) and within the disappointing circumstances of their lives. Sam was a just-barely-made-it former baseball player and flailing ladies' man; Diane, and Rebecca after her, were women exiled from the elegant and worldly lives that they had imagined for themselves; Norm and Carla and Frasier and Cliff each had family situations that tormented them, and they never wanted to go home. Only Coach, and later Woody, the softheaded ones, seemed at peace with the world. The surrogate family that these characters created was a huddle against the indignities and frustrations of real life—and none of them pretended otherwise. “Cheers” was deliriously funny, but it was also basically “The Iceman Cometh” with just a little more light let into the saloon.

NBC’s prime-time successor to "Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” was more flagrant in its misanthropy. It was a show about loneliness, self-loathing, and hostility toward both the vexing minutiae (airplane seats, parking spaces, rental-car lines) and the bigger, more intractable conundrums (work, love, marriage, family, death) of modern life. “Seinfeld” was not a show about nothing, as that misleading formulation has it; it was about how everything is more or less meaningless.

The mass appeal of these two shows feels, in hindsight, like a cultural miracle: imagine getting a group of television executives to green-light a show about a bar full of losers (real ones, not the fashionable kind that pass for losers on most shows), or one about a quartet of bitter yuppie nihilists—let alone convincing those execs that these shows would be all-time ratings bonanzas. Clearly, the success of both owed to the fact that they were so wildly funny—and, in both cases, the comedy sprang naturally out of their pessimistic perspectives. The celebrated verbal exchanges on “Cheers” were so appealing because the characters so obviously loved talking to each other. And the reason that they had so much time to gab was because they had nowhere else they could go where they’d be so well understood. The characters on “Seinfeld,” meanwhile, mostly disliked each other, but they remained friends both because of inertia—returning mindlessly to Jerry’s apartment, for instance, because what was the difference?—and because they really hated everybody else. (Other people didn’t seem to like them much, either.)

The dark-comedy successors to “Cheers” and “Seinfeld” enjoyed a more circumscribed kind of success, earning passionate but smaller audiences. “Arrested Development” had a cast of characters who were both motivated and crippled by self-hatred, and, as the show faltered in the ratings and was threatened with cancellation, that self-hatred became, in the form of meta-commentary, the show’s own vision of itself. “30 Rock,” which lasted longer and drew wider appreciation, became a pinnacle of artistic achievement at the same time that it argued, again and again, that television itself was a soulless and socially corrosive medium. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” combined the camaraderie of “Cheers” and the antisocial cruelty of “Seinfeld,” and added abject grotesqueness into the mix. Newer shows like “You’re the Worst” and “Catastrophe” have dismembered the romantic-comedy genre, arguing, in effect, that only suckers or idiots can truly fall in love. These shows are funny for different reasons, but, in each case, comedy isn’t used to deflect or hide feelings of anger, suspicion, or despair. Instead, it delights in making us confront them.