Bojack Horseman—It’s like an “Archer” for horses!

https://youtu.be/VESKjoxAmZg

Comedy, said Aristotle, shows us as worse than we are. Well, let it never be said that Hollywood neglects the Stagirite. A case in point is that cynic’s delight, Bojack Horseman, co-created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Lisa Hanawalt, now in its third season on Netflix, filling us in on all those glamourous folks in LA LA land, who, surprisingly enough, turn out to be pretty fucking shallow. For in LA, only the shallow survive.

A true cynic might complain that Bojack, a walking (upright) and talking horse, voiced by Will Arnett,¹ is simply a rip-off of Krusty the Clown, The Simpson’s long-running bourbon-slurpin’, pill-poppin’, whore-bangin’,² self-loathin’ celebrity train-wreck. Well, actually, true cynics can’t complain—not without turning into oxymorons, which is embarrassing.

Anyway, I’m wide-eyed enough to enjoy Bojack, in large part for its resemblances to my all-time favorite cartoon show, Archer, now in its seventh season. Bojack, like Archer, is basically an amazing colossal dick, who would like to do no more than drift through a life of undeserved privilege in an agreeable alcoholic daze, treating other people like disposable bathroom tissue, though fortunately not quite getting away with that ideal. Like Archer, Bojack is quite given to quick, subtle word play that often seems well above his literacy level, but if he wasn’t how would we know that the guys who write this shit are smart? And how would we know that we are smart?

To fill you in a little more, back in the nineties, Bojack was the star of Horsin’ Around, a very Full House-ish sitcom that made him a whacking big pile of money, so much that he can live, more or less permanently, it seems, in a hip ocean-front mansion with little more than his ennui to keep him company, that “little” consisting for the most part of couch-crashing über slacker/co-enabler Todd, Aaron Paul reprising/ripping off his Jesse Pinkman role from Breaking Bad, though dropping the R-rated meth to PG-13-rated weed.

Bojack’s sole connection to the outside world is his indefatigable agent Princess Caroline (Amy Sidaris), a cat of some sort,³ hoping against hope that, by sufficiently grooming Bojack’s massive, and massively wounded, ego, she can somehow leverage her LA standing from quasi-C list to quasi-B. Also along for much of the ride is Bojack’s quasi-girlfriend/conscience/intellectual sparring partner Diane, supposedly Vietnamese, but neither drawn nor voiced that way (by the seriously non-Asian Alison Brie).⁴ Sound familiar? So LA! Almost too LA!

Diane’s role as author’s mouthpiece/punching bag, allowing the show’s writers to make fun of all the idealistic bullshit writers who come to LA thinking they want to make it good when they really want to make it big, seems to have become a bit of an embarrassment to, well, all the formerly idealistic bullshit writers on Bojack,⁵ so she was semi-written out of the show by being married off to “Mr. Peanut Butter,” a Labrador retriever who also happens to be Bojack’s envied rival/opposite/doppelganger, a shamelessly content C lister who loves being a game show host. I get paid millions of dollars and get loved by millions of people just for being myself! What’s not to like?

Along with all the ennui, one of the basic conceits of Bojack is that the show takes place in a world that is half-human, half-animal, including down-sized whales and up-scaled insects. The animals can all talk, of course, and walk upright, and have opposable thumbs. For some reason, no chick ever tells Bojack “Wow! You really are a horse!” but otherwise there are a lot of animal jokes—mostly visual, like a secretary spider talking on the phone, doing her nails, and stirring her coffee at the same time. There are also a lot of Simpson-style jokes, like classic movie posters punningly changed to accommodate non-human leads. Funny! Funny! But, frankly, I mostly come for the banter and the hangovers.

The essence of Bojack’s discontent is never made clear. Despite having been nothing more than a Bob Saget with hooves, he seems to feel that he’s been to the top of the mountain, that he should be treated somehow as Hollywood royalty, though clearly he isn’t. He would sort of like to be, you know, absolutely, motherfuckingly huge, sort of Jack Nicolson/Billy Bob Thornton bad-ass huge, but that would take a lot of effort, and being seen making an effort, wow, that is embarrassing. It’s like you’re needy, practically like a loser, like all the pathetic faceless rats you see running around town. Better to just lie on the deck and nurse that hangover with a gentle Tequila sunrise until it’s time to get drunk again and watch the sun set in the ocean from that fabulous house that you have and no one else does.

Okay, Bojack is no Archer. For one thing, he doesn’t get to kill people. In addition to the lack of gore, there are less forgivable flaws, notably a tedious affection for “fourth-wall” humor, aka “meta”, aka proscenium-breaking (as the Greeks put it), nothing more profound or original than winking at the audience. In addition, some of the jibes directed at popular culture—making fun of Ryan Seacrest, for example—fail to measure up to my conception of “edge”.⁶ Even worse, the show waxes both too “dark”—as when Bojack “confesses” that he deliberately hurts the people he feels drawn to in order to avoid contaminating his fast lane LA life style with anything as tacky as emotional truth—and too sweet—occasional “aww” moments about how, say, cheap, manipulative sit-coms bring real hope and joy to the emotionally deprived. “Golly, you mean I made a real contribution to your childhood! And I thought I was only getting tail!”

But these are (relatively) minor complaints. And until I get a deck with an ocean view, I’ll probably keep on watching.