Four episodes into the third season of Netflix's BoJack Horseman, the animated series hits, and sustains, the peak of its creative genius. After getting blacklisted from nearly every film festival in the world, the flawed protagonist finds himself torpedoing to an underwater city for the Pacific Ocean Film Festival, where he wears an air helmet that prevents him from communicating with the wet world around him.

"Fish Out of Water," which some critics are already flagging for a possible Emmy nomination, has the distinction of joining the tiny pool of television shows that have successfully attempted the silent episode.

But the silence merely amplifies the notion that the episode was not, in fact, silent at all. "I was like, silent episode? There's like 20 minutes of music in it!" says Jesse Novak, who composes background music and original songs in BoJack Horseman, save for Patrick Carney's theme song and Grouplove's ending credits tune. "That's how people perceive it a lot of the time. You want to take that as a compliment—you need to take that as a compliment as a composer—because what you don't want to hear is, 'It was a great episode but that music was annoying me.'"

For all three seasons of the show, Novak has served as a sort of emotional puppeteer of BoJack Horseman, much like on the underwater episode, shaping scenes with music that adjusts the tone to accent the dialogue or writing quick-hit, comedic songs woven into the narrative. More so than with previous seasons, Novak was given more opportunities to explore the latter format, yielding standouts including Sextina Aquafina's "Get Dat Fetus, Kill Dat Fetus," "2007 Generic Pop Song," an extended version of "Who's That Dog (Theme from Mr. Peanutbutter's House)" and "Keep Driving." Penning comedic songs that avoid erring on too corny or earnest is of itself a challenge—Flight of the Conchords, for example, often struck the balance correctly—and Novak is given just enough rope at just the right time to execute moments that manage to stick with the viewer after playback's end.

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"I love an opportunity to put in a song that actually becomes a gag or part of the show, even if it's small," says Novak, who has been friends with the show's creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg since college. "I do feel like the job of the composer is to help gel everything together, to give the viewer a cohesive experience from one episode to the next, familiar sounds that return even when you're in unfamiliar territory. It's to give more consistency so that when you're watching, every time you watch an episode, you feel like you're going to that place again. Just like wardrobe or makeup or anything else, it has to have consistency."

Novak, who previously worked as a session musician for Diplo (he worked on M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes") and composed music for The Mindy Project (which starred his brother B.J. Novak), explains that process doesn't much vary for composing original music for the show. In most instances, the writing staff supplies him with lyrics around which he writes music. It's by no means glamorous, but gives him wiggle room to let his creativity shine through. "I get a rough animatic, which is a black-and-white animation that's cool-looking and doodle-y," he says. "There's voice acting and I basically fill in over these scenes and write over the picture. We go in, we play it scene by scene. We watch it together and talk about where we were going to put music and then I come back with the music and we talk about it once." If revisions are needed, he'll make them. It's as simple as that.

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The underwater episode, of course, presented its own set of challenges. "I wanted it to feel like the show and yet feel different, which I think is exactly what the episode is," says Novak. He incorporated more electronic sounds to add more energy and took directive to evoke the feeling of synesthesia, the sensation where you can see music as colors. "They wanted it to sound underwater. I kept getting these comments about that and people would think, how do you explain what underwater music sounds like? And I don't know how to put it into words, but I definitely put it into sounds."

His comedic songs were mainly written into the scripts, and were dependent more on aesthetic and style over anything else. "2007 Generic Pop Song," a sort of threequel to past seasons' "This Is a Song from the 80s" and "Generic 90s Grunge Song," features BoJack's agent Princess Carolyn cruising down the street singing to the track, rich with Auto-Tune and saturated with EDM signifiers. Novak wrote and recorded the rap on his own, which the writers kept. "It's very easy to take the generic decade idea and make a song out of it, because I've always been paying attention to production style trends," he says.

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Perhaps the most absurdist original comes in the form of Sextina Aquafina's "Get Dat Fetus, Kill Dat Fetus," the culmination of an episode so confrontationally pro-life that anti-abortionists need not apply. But it's the self-awareness in the show's songs that make them so compelling, particularly with "Keep Driving," which plays during the third season's ninth episode, "Best Thing That Ever Happened." After simultaneously botching two deals for BoJack, Princess Carolyn meets him at his restaurant where he plans to fire her. As the kitchen gets thrown into crisis and she decides to leave BoJack to his own devices, she drives away with the restaurant in her rearview mirror as "Keep Driving" begins to play. She's tapping her wheel in time to the alt-rock tune while the vocalist sings, "Keep driving, don't turn that car around / Break your pattern of needing to fix other people / Just keep on driving away." When she asks herself who they write these songs for, the song continues: "Don't go back to the restaurant Princess Carolyn / Just keep driving away."

In instances like "Keep Driving," some songs are simpler to write than others. "My first thought was, 'oh, I want it to sound like the Jonas Brothers,'" recalls Novak. "I demoed it by the next morning and I didn't have time to get to the studio where I would have been able to lay something down like that, so I ended up recording something that was an acoustic demo and I slowed it down a little. What I thought was a placeholder song, everybody really ended up liking it like that, and I never gave it the real pop energy treatment and I kept it a little sentimental."

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For Novak, there hasn't been much of a change in directive and task since the show's beginning, other than the increase of original songs in season three. But as a fan of the show—even though he only binged this season up until the underwater episode, to see how it came out—he too is excited about the prospect of the show reaching new emotional depths.

"I think we're finding out how dark it's willing to go," he says. "But at the same time, it can be an uplifting thing, which has always been the trick of the show. There's a lot of relatability in places you wouldn't necessarily expect it. It's continuing to do that. Addressing things like death and drug overdoses and morally perilous sexual situations, stuff that is not really fun or pleasant to talk about when it happens in real life. But maybe this is something almost therapeutic about seeing it happen in a cartoon that's got these ridiculous animals and some slapstick elements. It helps you digest the painful bits that are also there. As the show goes, it's leaning more into that thing where you want to sink into the meat of humanity."

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