Two Notes On BoJack Horseman

1. This show would be so bad if there were no anthropomorphic animals in there, but there are so it’s raw and beautiful. It’s all in that great Kafka trick of twisting the world with dream-logic only to reveal you didn’t. First, the fact that the protagonists are sapient, anthropomorphic animals gives their incessant existential crises something like a secret ontological validity. When BoJack whines that there is something wrong with him, or Princess Caroline professes that she doesn’t know what she is living for, we’re less inclined than usual to think ‘get over it’ because part of us recognizes that their sapience and human lives are a distortion of the natural order of things, no matter how hard the fictional world refuses to acknowledge this. Second, we compare the animal characters to the human characters and to ourselves, and recognize that sapient, anthropomorphic apes are just as wrong as sapient, anthropomorphic cats and horses, and that our own existential crises and those of people around us also have a kind of ontological validity.

2. It’s not exactly trying to sync up to the cultural cycle of the internet, which can’t possibly work, but it sort of invests in cultural-capital startups. Half of the plot of season one was a homage to the relationship between Jesse and Walter back in Breaking Bad, which wasn’t even off the air yet when they started. I don’t think that they were trying to be topical or purposefully ephemeral, though –  instead, it was a kind of bet that Breaking Bad is a new classic. Now the latest season has a ‘coming out as asexual’ arc, which is as close as a TV show can get to purchasing Tumblr stock.