BoJack Horseman: On being human, and permanence

Sometimes a box of chocolates is so good that you save the last one. You can’t quite bear to part with it… To know that the best? … It’s gone, and things are only downhill from here. And so, it sits in the box, slowly ageing — the sugar rising to the surface, and the bitter chocolate cracking and going stale.

My ageing chocolate? That was the last episode of the recognised-yet-underrated Netflix show, BoJack Horseman. I kept it in the virtual cupboard, aware that once I popped it on, within 25 minutes there would be no more new BoJack, period.

I worried BoJack, the show not the horse, would have aged in my absence… that my connection would have faded, or that the baggage of 48 previous episodes would be too much to carry in one single moment of closure. I worried about the sugar rising to the surface, and the bitter chocolate cracking and going stale.

I needn’t have worried because all the beauty and darkness was just as fresh as that first bite back in season one, only matured with the depth of all the shared moments that preceded it.

In finishing BoJack (for the first time, because I’m sure there will be others), I wanted to reflect on what makes it so special.

Few shows understand the comedic impact of repetition and permanence as well as BoJack. Something readily mastered by the Simpsons is the humour inherent in repetition — a good repetition joke stops just before it gets old. Yet in his book Planet Simpson, writer Chris Turner discusses the Simpsons’ mastery of the art of repetition. The trick isn’t stopping just before the joke gets old, it’s going through the joke getting old and coming out the other side in absurdity. Case in point? Sideshow Bob and all those rakes. There is a willingness to break the show for the joke that brings the audience inside the joke.

But BoJack isn’t satisfied with the slapstick form of the Simpsons’ take on repetition. Instead, we experience something deeper in BoJack — permanence. The resulting experience is similar to repetition in how it is experienced, gradually woven in and out of individual episodes. It’s something I’m going to dub The Hollywoo Effect: In short, what happens in BoJack, stays in BoJack.

The show is an object lesson in permanence — the result is that six series in, watching the show feels like a conversation with your best friend, filled with the kind of private jokes that can only built through a combination of time, creativity and repetition. That’s the Hollywoo Effect. In the case of Hollywoo itself, the missing ‘d’ is a joke that is set up in season one and yet continues to pay off all the way through to the final episode.

The show is full of these moments. Some are simple call backs, for example Mr. Peanutbutter’s insistence on using the same sign company despite the ensuing miscommunication issues that arise every time, in all six seasons. Others are more impactful — the idea of optioning a birthday card for a movie would be a brief joke in most shows. In BoJack it becomes a background moment for two series.

This insistence on playing for keeps enables BoJack to evoke one of the fundamental experiences of what it is to be human: things change, for better and for worse, but all we can do is keep riding forward. Laugh or cry, Hollywood is Hollywoo now. I once heard a quote — unfortunately I can’t source it, but in effect it was this: “All human drama is rooted in time”. The fact we are constrained to experiencing our lives just once, without the ability to rewind or change things, is the cause of all anguish. It’s our very own Hollywoo Effect, and it’s what makes life both valuable, and crushing. Laugh or cry, but don’t think you can change it. BoJack’s comments about wasting the best years of Princess Carolyn’s life, his concern that he is “past it” in the entertainment business… This drama is defined by time, and it is the root of what keeps many of us awake at night.

The only other show I know that is as willing to play with fundamental, permanent changes in the way BoJack does is The Good Place, which somehow survived multiple wholesale changes in what the show actually was, and yet still stuck the landing perfectly.

What is interesting to me about this similarity is that both The Good Place and BoJack have more to say about the human experience than any other show I’ve seen. No “any comedy show” caveat needed, because I can’t think of a single show to conjures the myriad of emotions, the uncertainty and anxiety and the loss that being human encapsulates.

In dealing with my issues of permanence, and in particular that of BoJack’s conclusion, I’ll end with a quote. Taken from BoJack creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s 2015 interview with the Verge, it says so much of what this show set out to convey:

“…I don’t believe in endings. I think you can fall in love and get married and you can have a wonderful wedding, but then you still have to wake up the next morning and you’re still you. Like, you can have the worst day of your life, but then the next day won’t be the worst day of your life. And I think it works in a positive and a negative, that all these things that happen are moments in time. And that because of the narrative we’ve experienced, we’ve kind of internalized this idea that we’re working toward some great ending, and that if we put all our ducks in a row we’ll be rewarded, and everything will finally make sense. But the answer is that everything doesn’t make sense, at least as far as I’ve found.”