BoJack Horseman: From Pitch to Production

How Raphael Bob-Waksberg developed the idea of this adult animated dramedy and brought it to life with Lisa Hanawalt, The Tornante Company, and Netflix.

Season 3, Episode 10 — “It’s You”

The idea

Tracing an idea back to its origin often requires the detail and scope of an autobiography. To make a long story short, the creator of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, was raised in Palo Alto, California, studied at Bard College in New York, and subsequently moved to Los Angeles to pursue comedy and screenwriting.

While actively developing original series in the hopes of pitching them to production companies, Raphael came up with the idea of an animated show incorporating the designs of cartoonist and illustrator Lisa Hanawalt, who has long had a penchant for drawing anthropomorphic animals. Lisa and Raphael had been friends since attending middle-school together in Palo Alto and according to Lisa she has, “always drawn animal people.” The two had already worked together on a webcomic, Tip Me Over, Pour Me Out.

But beyond the world of humanoid animal characters, the concept of a washed-up sitcom star living in a mansion overlooking the city came from Raphael’s more personal experiences. Upon moving to L.A., he initially rented a tiny bedroom on Hollywood Hills, in an opulent home similar to BoJack’s.

Not the actual house but you get the idea.

“And I got there, and I was this nobody and I didn’t know anybody in town. And there was this winding, treacherous road up to get there, which I was terrified of taking. And I felt so disconnected from everything. And that idea of feeling simultaneously on top of the world and also never more alone and isolated was the beginning of this character for me, and I wanted to make a show about a character who’d had every opportunity for success and still couldn’t find a way to be happy.”

The adage, “write what you know,” is advice commonly given and perhaps more commonly derided, as it’s often taken to mean to write only thinly veiled autobiographies, but the creation of BoJack Horseman shows that writing can both be off-the-wall speculative and deeply grounded in lived experiences.

The treatment

With the seed of an idea in place, the official process began with a general meeting between Raphael and producers at Tornante, a production company founded by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. These “meet-and-greets” are common in the industry and used to simply get to know one another and explore the prospect of working together. Prior to the meeting Raphael’s manager sent over a variety of writing samples, mostly spec work and sketches for the comedy troupe Raphael was a member of.

After this initial meeting went well they scheduled another where the Tornante producers pitched him on developing a project they were working on, but Raphael ultimately felt it wasn’t a good fit and turned it down. Obviously convinced of Raphael’s abilities as a writer, they called him back in to see what ideas he had for them. He soft pitched five projects, one of which was BoJack. Steve Cohen, a producer, asked which Raphael was most interested in and he said, “I think the horse one.”

Tornante asked for a treatment they could, “look at and sent around,” also referred to as a one-pager. Prior to this Raphael had written up the idea for “BoJack the Depressed Talking Horse” and ran it by Lisa to get her feedback and ask permission to use some of her drawings in a presentation. This treatment sets up the concept of the show, lays out the characters, and suggests how the combination can lead to episodic storylines and conflicts.

Email between Raphael and Lisa, taken from “BoJack Horseman: The Art Before the Horse.”

At this stage there are some marked differences next to what eventually becomes of the show. BoJack as a character is the most developed—a miserable, washed up 90s sitcom star living in a bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills. He’s described as, “Larry David meets Bender from Futurama meets a horse.”

Topher is more or less the same character as Todd, the whimsical freeloader. The biggest distinction is Topher is described as always trying to meet girls, whereas Todd is more aloof about relationships and eventually comes out as asexual.

Mr. Peanutbutter by name appears here, but the character is completely different. In this treatment he is BoJack’s agent, compared to Shaft, and his role is primarily to get BoJack to take on small projects. Honeybucket is another horse character with a role resembling the Mr. Peanutbutter we know from the final show. Another 90s sitcom star with an eerily similar premise to Horsin’ Around who is seemingly, “stupid and shallow,” but, “the life of the party.”

Diane’s character here is somewhat reminiscent to her character on the show, described as Honeybucket’s girlfriend and a love-interest for BoJack, but rather than a ghost writer, she is billed as a development executive. And then there’s Chelsea, a character unknown to the show, who is BoJack’s on-again/off-again girlfriend he won’t commit to. These plot points are familiar to Princess Carolyn’s character but this description lacks any of the personal traits that motivate and define her. The female characters here are largely undeveloped outside of their relationship to BoJack.

The pitch

All of this sets the stage for an official pitch to the head of Tornante, Michael Eisner. For Raphael this meant further developing his logline, detailing the characters, and a coming up with a rundown of potential episodes. By the time of this meeting with Eisner the characters more closely resemble who winds up on the show.

The roles of Chelsea and Mr. Peanutbutter have been collapsed into Princess Carolyn as agent and ex-girlfriend, Honeybucket remains the same but renamed and re-speciesed as Mr. Peanutbutter, and Diane is now BoJack’s ghostwriter, her Vietnamese heritage is included, and her personality is more developed as, “upbeat, but not cloyingly so,” with a dry sense of humor. The character sheet also includes Pinky Penguin, a contact for the publishing company that picked up BoJack’s book, who is a recurring character on the show but does not end up being a central character.

The official pitch treatment.

The character sheet is very familiar to anyone who has watched the show, but includes some unrealized ideas, such as that Mr. Peanutbutter is constantly filming different but identically premised reality shows (he stars in just one reality show in the first season) or that Pinky is the a target for pyramid schemes and other scams (though financially destitute in the show, it’s only as a result of the crumbling publishing industry). The pitch also includes seven episode synopses ranging in length from three to seven paragraphs. BoJack throws a party!” and, “BoJack supports the troops!” crudely reflect the first two episodes eventually produced.

Scraped plotlines include BoJack playing a cameo of Hitler’s horse, BoJack’s car breaking down, BoJack talking at an anti-drug event for high schoolers, and BoJack and Mr. Peanutbutter volunteering to work with competing inner-city little league teams. The show here is presented as much more episodic than what BoJack Horseman becomes, with more self-contained stories for each episode and little indication of a season or series arc.

The pilot

The meeting resulted in a green light from Michael Eisner, which meant Tornante would be financing a pilot presentation to take to distributors. In order to make the show it still needed to be picked up by a television channel or streaming service. With Tornante now backing the project the show could be developed further. They tried to bring in Lisa Hanawalt to work on designs for the presentation, but she initially turned them down, so the studio tried out a few animators to take on the designs. None of them were quite working with what they envisioned based on Lisa’s sketches.

Meanwhile Raphael was starting on scripts. Tornante first asked for an outline of an episode, ten to fifteen pages describing the plot points beat by beat. Raphael had already written the first script, but his manager explained that everything would happen on different levels, “So send out the outline first; you get paid for the outline.” From there he was hired to write the scripts that would go along with the presentation. Increasingly, however, he was getting discouraged on the prospect of selling the show.

“At least I’m getting paid for these scripts, but this is going nowhere. No one’s going to buy this.”

It all turned around when six months later they approached Lisa again and she joined the team. Given how central her designs are to the aesthetic of the show it’s hard to imagine what it would have become without her. With her on board and a few of Raphael’s scripts on hand they started developing what was essentially a pilot. Also known as a “proof of concept,” they would cast and produce a rough episode on their own to make their pitch stronger.

Early sketch of BoJack.

They went to ShadowMachine for animation, hired Mike Hollingsworth as their supervising director, and cast Will Arnett, Aaron Paul, Amy Sedaris, and others as voice actors. This development period spanned all of 2011 and 2012. In that time Raphael was also hired to work as a staff writer on a few other shows, such as NBC’s Save Me, which gave him more experience in writing for television and working in a writer’s room.

When their presentation was finished they started approaching different outlets, varying their pitch to the strengths of the companies. For Netflix, which was an up and comer in original content at the time, Raphael focused on the serialized potential of the show. Mike Hollingsworth recalled that, “when [Raphael] pitched it to Animal Planet [he] really played up the animal aspects.” Comparisons with other shows are also a common way to paint a picture of a new project, and at various times BoJack Horseman was compared to Girls, Louie, Madmen, Archer, and Greenberg.

After pitching Netflix on the full season, which had Raphael going through with them each episode of the first season’s arc, they came back and told Tornante that they’d pick it up if they could get the first season released in less than a year.

“[Netflix] said, ‘this summer or we don’t want it.’ Basically.”

The production

This meant ramping up to the full staff to write the entire season and finalize all the character and set designs while working to record the voiceovers and ultimately animate the show. Writers were warned they’d be working overtime with little time off to get the show done.

And even with BoJack Horseman being developed for over two years now, this process still involved honing down on the concept and deciding what it’s all about. Here are some of Lisa’s notes from a design meeting:

- bojack writing book - miserable narcissist - book will make everyone love me - hit book is published - he gets everything he wants but he’s still miserable

Despite being an almost comically broad overview, it shows how writers and designers get to the heart of a character. There were a lot of conversations going back and forth on how to write and depict them. Todd’s design went through many iterations to achieve his stoner causal yet exuberant look, while the staff writers talked about how to make BoJack an asshole but relatable while also not endorsing his bad behavior.

“Something very early on that we wanted to make clear with BoJack was that we want you to empathize with him; we want you to feel his wound and feel his pain, and we want you to want him to get better. We never want him to be an aspirational figure. He’s not a cool guy.”

What that meant for each writer was something different. In breaking episodes, a collaborative process of outlining and figuring out the story beats, there were often arguments over what BoJack would do and whether those actions were ultimately forgivable. After each episode was outlined together in the room, individual writers went off on their own to write the first drafts of an episode assigned to them. These were then read by the entire writing staff and punched up with the original writer going back to do revisions. From there they had a readthrough to see how it worked with the inflections of each cast member. The final revision would involve Raphael going through and tweaking scripts for a consistent tone and overall arc.

In the end countless decisions big and small by dozens of artists working between a few companies contributed to what we see now on screen. The kernel of, “BoJack The Depressed Talking Horse,” is what spawned this show, but developing that idea over several years goes to show how writing needs room to grow into something unexpected.