Even when most of the analyses I write are surrounding music, I would say that the field in which I have the most knowledge and experience in analyzing are stories. No matter what piece of art I’m analyzing I tend to focus on the narrative side of it and what it’s trying to convey; after all, my first approximation with writing was creating short stories so that I didn’t get bored in school. And when it came to reviewing my first heavily story-based art piece for the newspaper, I couldn’t have chosen a better one than the first season of Bojack Horseman.
I’d heard wonders about this show from different places, and even though I haven’t yet delved into the rest of its seasons, the first one (the only one I’m covering in this article) gave me enough to consider it as one of the most complex and well achieved experiences I’ve ever had with adult animation, and with animation in general.
The first season has many feats: the acting is amazing, the animation is unique and a bit ugly in the way that most adult animation is, while still holding a lot of expression and style, but its greatest quality lies in its script. The characters are amazing, the plot is amazing, but what stood out to me was the ability of the narrative to portray guilt and responsibility through the consequences of its main character’s actions – in a way that’s incredibly innovative and unique to the sitcom genre. I’ll do this by both comparing how this show portrays its themes compared to other famous sitcoms, and the powerful impact it can have on its viewers.
When it comes to guilt, there’s really no shortage of examples to look for. From the very first second of the story we see that Bojack constantly displays different behaviors that could be considered erratic and irreverent, which will eventually end up hurting those in his life. He’s a deeply flawed character, just like most of the characters that we find in other sitcoms, and even though his flaws are portrayed in ways that can be seen as comedic and exaggerated at times, there’s a little more to the character than what initially meets the eye. Throughout just the first episodes we also see that Bojack’s behaviorial issues come from many different self-destructive patterns that are deeply rooted within Bojack’s perception of himself, his perceived value and the people that surround him. He is not written as being erratic just for the sake of being so, or as a comedic device; Bojack is presented as a highly intelligent and self-aware individual that is on a constant downfall into his own self-hatred and self-destructive tendencies. This is already much more complex and humanizing of a portrait than what you usually find in most sitcoms, especially at the beginning of one. But that’s not all we’re introduced to – after setting up the destructive and toxic ‘norm’ that Bojack lives in, we’re presented with the factor that’ll change that very reality: a woman hired to ghostwrite Bojack’s autobiography, Diane Nguyen.
Diane essentially challenges everything that Bojack perceives to be an unchangeable truth about himself and his surroundings. She witnesses first-hand all of the self-destructive behaviors that he engages in, and how he hurts himself and people along the way, but still sticks around to try to comprehend him. Yes, this is in part because of her job, but as we begin to see their relationship develop we see her as potentially able to help Bojack get out of his self-destructive spiral. This is until, of course, he hurts her.
In episode 5 of the series, after watching Bojack do some of the worst things he’s done in the entire season towards two of his closest friends, Todd and Sarah Lynn, we learn a bit more about Diane and her background, particularly her traumatic childhood and her incredibly toxic family… who Bojack gets wonderfully along with. Near the climax of the episode Bojack essentially mocks and degrades her for the sake of feeling part of a group of people as damaged as him with little to no care towards Diane; when she rightfully gets mad about it, Bojack realizes that he has messed up. This is not the first time it happens in the show (in episode 3 we also saw moments of regret) but this is the most honest and caring of the times he actually regrets and tries to do better. He goes to Diane and expresses through a heartfelt letter how much he actually admires her despite his hurtful actions… and it works. She forgives him, and their bond tightens for the rest of the season. This interaction falls a bit into more of a conventional formula when it comes to sitcoms, and is one that I would like to check in more depth.
In my introduction I just mentioned that I think the way Bojack Horseman portrays guilt and responsibility is incredibly unique and innovative to the genre, but in that very moment where Bojack reconciles so easily with Dianne, it almost seems like it’s just playing into a known trope in stories when it comes to quick forgiveness, and even though this wonderful first season of the show goes way beyond that lazy trope, I still would like to take a moment and analyze how that trope has been presented in previous shows, and most importantly, the effect tropes like those can ultimately have in the way we live an relate to each other as human beings.
It is a known fact that art is shaped after our human experience of the world, but I think we also need to have more conversations about how art shapes us.
I grew up as a neurodivergent child who was very much isolated from my environment, I never really related to other kids and even when I did I grew up with protective enough parents so that I wasn’t really allowed outside of my house without their supervision, so most of the times the only way that I had to learn what was “normal” when it came to social interaction came from art that I had around me, mostly TV shows, and specially sitcoms, through those fictional characters I learned jokes and catchphrases, but I also learned how people interacted, what was acceptable and unacceptable and how real life was, specially by being young and not really knowing that not everything in TV is real.
But how is all of this related to the depressing tale of an animated horse actor who fell hard from grace and is trying and failing to get back into it? Well, just like me when I was a child watching TV, a lot of people learn about what’s acceptable and unacceptable in society by watching sitcoms, and one of the things that made out this first season stand out for me so much is that it teaches you that actions have consequences and that’s not something you normally see on American sitcoms.
Taking one of the biggest of them as an example, in just the first season of Friends we can see several times where the characters do questionable and hurtful things to others mostly, but also a few times between the main cast, it’s never something as hurtful as Bojack’s actions but they’re still there: Rachel leaving someone in the altar unprompted, Joey lying to Monica so she goes on a weird double date with him are a couple that come to mind just now.
And I don’t really mean to get all moral about it, I understand that sitcoms are heavily based in unusual situations that can be unethical in different ways and characters need to be flawed in order to be relatable, and when it comes to hurting secondary characters I don’t find it even that worrying, but when it comes to the main cast, which are supposed to be a model of how friendship is in real life, seeing them cross each other’s limits even when it’s slight, only to be fixed later by a simple apology sends off the message that relationships work that way, that when you hurt people close to you or people that you love, whether it was intentional or not, a sincere and heartfelt apology will fix it and they will see you again as the person who they are close to and who they love. But sometimes it’s not that way, it’s just not how the real world works.
Even then, there could easily be an argument made about how Friends is deliberately exaggerated and the flaws in its representation of reality are not that harmful. However, there’s some shows that take this premise of moral relativism and take it to really dangerous places… Let’s talk about The Big Bang Theory (TBBT).
When it came to Friends I watched the majority of its first season for this article in order to get examples for my point, but when it came to TBBT I only needed to watch around two or three episodes in order to write around six hundred words in my notes of all of the unethical, questionable and downright awful things that the characters did: Leonard is constantly treating Sheldon in condescending ways while at the same time never communicating clearly with him, as well as putting his friend’s wellbeing and comfort in danger for selfish reasons, but Sheldon isn’t an angel either, just in the second episode we see how he irrupts in someone’s house in the middle of the night without consent, something that is directly a crime in many places, and the show tries to justify his actions by showing him as clueless of basic consent notions, then you have Howard who is just a misogynistic asshole who thinks he’s better than everybody, and then the show tells you that these incredibly toxic people are good friends?
It’s not only bad writing in the way that it just doesn’t make sense, but when we take into account everything I’ve mentioned about sitcoms shaping the way that we look at our world and society, all of this becomes so much worse. Because, even though there are responses to the character’s actions, they are never lasting or significant consequences, Leonard feels bad about being selfish and treating Sheldon awfully and just by apologizing everything is back to normal, when it comes to Sheldon and his incredibly creepy behavior, he never even apologizes, the show just convinces us that he didn’t do it with bad intentions so he shouldn’t experience consequences for it, and the misogyny in Howard is essentially one of his character’s features so he is bound to never get better. The Big Bang Theory shows to us how its characters are selfish, disrespectful and misogynistic and even when it never goes directly to saying their actions are acceptable, it still shows them as tolerable, small flaws in the characters that make them who they are, and that is not only bad enough on its fictional world, but it has real consequences.
I’ve spent most of my pre-pubescent years in online forums surrounding comics and “geek culture” and I saw how toxic behaviors (especially toxic masculinity) were so prevalent and present in pretty much everywhere you turned to, I saw how toxic characters like the ones in TBBT were idolized by other pre-pubescent kids that were still forming their personality. Even when it came to more nuanced portrayals of toxic behavior, the nuance flew right off the hats of all of them and they were just left idolizing these horrible models of what someone “cool” should be. And when kids like that watch shows like The Big Bang Theory, they’re going to take on its lessons: that being misogynistic, disrespectful of boundaries and selfish are things that, even when they’re not ok, can easily be fixed by a half-done apology, and the consequences of them learning that, especially when it comes to little boys, is incredibly dangerous.
After these paragraphs, I’m sure I almost sound like a catholic mother having a satanic panic over unethical behaviors being shown in art, but I did write an entire article about the power that art can have to purge our demons through depictions of murder and jealousy so, where’s the line when it comes to stories?
That’s where Bojack comes back to save the day. It was important to set up the comparation with other iconic sitcoms because the last couple of episodes of the show are the ones that diverge the most form any usual coursed path when it comes to tackling responsibility, guilt and consequences, and by far the best episodes in the whole show.
In episode 10, after several other mishaps between Bojack and Diane, their relationship stays civil at the very least, even though that’s not a sign that Bojack has healed or gotten better at all, in fact, throughout the season he keeps distancing himself from everyone in his life through his own hurtful actions towards them, and is just tumbling from one thing to the other, when finally in this third to last episode, the autobiography that has been the main goal of both the main characters is ultimately finished, so when Diane gives it to Bojack, excited, he… Essentially, he does another Bojack.
The book confronted him with the embarrassing reality that his life has been for the entire season, all of the bad choices and things he has done moved by his flaws, he realizes the impact that he’s had on the people around him, even when Diane did her best to portray him as flawed but vulnerable individual, he still felt ashamed that his true flawed nature was exposed like that. So he lashes out in anger to Diane, disrespects the work she´s been doing for months and puts it aside, making it so that then Diane, irritated by his attitude, publishes a snippet of it online, making the world see the true Bojack Horseman, warts and all.
Episode 11 sees Bojack refusing to accept Diane’s work as his autobiography and stating in a really narcissistic and self-centered way that he can do something way better by himself, so he sets out to do it only to find that he’s still not ready to open up and hoping that the help of friends and lots of drugs get him through it, and this is where the episode gets interesting. In the middle of the narcotic frenzy Bojack starts hallucinating heavily and through those hallucinations we get to learn more about him than we have through the entire show so far, we learn about his fears, where his deepest problems and insecurities started and the deep guilt that he feels over the bad things he has done towards the people in his life, we see him literally deconstructing himself through some of the greatest animation in the whole season, but what might be the most crushing of it all… after a pep talk with the hallucinogenic version of Diane, he pictures what he really wants to be, he sees himself with a family he loves, getting old in a quiet place, building something better than what he came from, and in the middle of that hopeful dream we can hear the words of that hallucinogenic Diane resonating
“It’s never too late to be the person you want to be”
Then we see Bojack wake up from the trip only to then go and present himself in an unexpected way to the real Diane to tell her that he’s truly sorry for everything he’s done, he reveals himself in the most vulnerable way that we’ve seen in the entire show, he tells her that the true reason about why he was upset, and how he’s aware of all of the flaws and bad traits that he carries, and the only thing he asks of her is to tell him that is not too late, if the imaginary Diane could say it, the real one saying it as well might be his only salvation, he begs for her to tell him that there’s good in him, after all the hurt, after all the pain, he just desperately needs to believe that there can be good in him. We are reminded of that earlier occasion on the show where he apologized in a way that was way less risky and emotional, we remember how that went, and our collective imaginary based on other shows makes us wait for her answer… but it never comes.
In the next episode, the last one, we see the aftermath of everything that the series has been leading to so far. The biography that has been the central point of the entire season finally gets published and it achieves everything we’ve been set to expect. Everybody loves it, and everyone is putting their eyes back on Bojack, but in this episode he’s more cynical than in the entire season, he definitely isn’t happy, even though he has everything he wanted to; he’s an icon again, he inspired hundreds of people, but he did it with a book he didn’t wrote and didn’t even wanted published, and most importantly, he did it while hurting every single person who cared about him on the way. Near the end of the episode we finally get an answer from the question that Bojack threw to Diane at the end of the last one, an answer that in my opinion summarizes this season’s message perfectly.
“-I don’t think I believe in deep down. I kind of think all you are is just the things that you do
-Well, that’s depressing”
Then the episode goes on a montage to show us how all of the other characters ended up, in the company of friends and loved ones, laughing and sharing their happiness, All of the people that interacted and were hurt by Bojack throughout the season finally found places of plentitude, and we finish with our main horse all alone in a big house with everything he ever wanted, but still finding himself watching his old victories, with his fake family hugging him and credits rolling.
Even without those last episodes the show would still be one of the most real and authentic portrayals of relationships, guilt, and responsibility on American television, but those last moments of near redemption and utter emptiness drive all its points home in the most fantastic and impactful way possible. Contrary to the examples that I showed, in this show, after Bojack hurt all the people in his life engaging in toxic behavior, even after showing repent and authentic guilt, he ends up alone, his actions are driven to the last consequences, and he is left to work and get better, by and for himself, and himself only.
It’s the furthest it could be from a happy ending, but it’s the ending this story needed, and it’s an ending that was long overdue when it comes to fiction and sitcoms. Much like Tyler in NEW MAGIC WAND, Raphael Bob- Waksberg and the team behind this show place in Bojack a vulnerable and human portrait of several self-destructive behaviors that we can sympathize with as an audience, but at the same time keeping us aware of how these behaviors, no matter how human, can have a deep and hurtful effect on the people surrounding us, and the first season’s ending is almost like a warning of how the viewer will end if they don’t learn from the tale of this middle-aged horse actor, and it’s so real it hurts.
The first season of Bojack was really emotional to watch for me, when I first watched it I was just going through the aftermath of realizing how much I’d hurt a person that I cared really deeply for, who didn’t accept my guilt and regret either, and as much as it put me to shame, I identified with a lot of Bojack’s behavior and character, I saw some of the darkest things of myself in him, and I connected with him especially in those moments where he realized the damage he had done and tried to fix it but simply couldn’t; in episode 8, after he fails in apologizing to one of the closest friends he ever lost, when he stops in the middle of the highway only to look back and anxiously reach for the friend he knew he never could get back, I cried, because I saw myself in that anxiousness, and even when I was watching to write this I still feel the chills, a bit of myself cracking. In a way, I felt less lonely dealing with a feeling that I never really saw portrayed in fiction, but most importantly, I got the warning about the show, and I realized what was really important and what I should do, it was an integral part of the healing and learning journey I’m going through.
This show is uncomfortable to watch, too real, too naked, but sometimes, that’s exactly what we need. Because it’s in discomfort where we grow and learn, and in one of the most comfortable genres ever to exist in entertainment, the way the first season of Bojack Horseman pushes for an incredibly uncomfortable sitcom while remaining clever and funny, it’s one of the best things that can ever happen when it comes to comedy, animation, sitcoms, and with art in general.
—Writer Eduardo Méndez Alcántar can be reached at miraclegoodnight@hotmail.com Follow her/him on instagram @_.m.iracle_
