This piece originally appeared on the Guardian TV blog in July 2016.
BoJack Horseman, Netflix’s animated comedy about a talking horse, is so much more than an animated comedy about a talking horse. It’s funny, it’s serious; it’s dark, it’s colourful; it is, at once, a silly story about a washed-up sitcom star, set in an anthropomorphic world where blue whales are newsreaders and his agent is a pink cat, and a complex, almost aggressive portrayal of despair and self-loathing. It is, for all its gags, one of the most subversively sad shows on TV, a marriage of cynicism and sincerity; a weird, fascinating piece of work able to ask questions no other show can. What if Penguin Publishing was actually run by penguins? Is your boyfriend three children in a trench coat? Is there such a thing as being good deep-down, or are you just a bad person?
Will Arnett stars as the titular BoJack, whose cheesy, feel-good sitcom Horsin’ Around made him a celebrity in the 90s. Fast-forward 20 years and he’s an alcoholic has-been; a star that’s collapsed into a black hole of depression, narcissism, selfishness, pettiness and spite – one that threatens to devour everyone else around him.
The first series followed BoJack’s comeback from obscurity, powered by One Trick Pony, a tell-all book written by then-love interest and now-friend Diane (Alison Brie). Her portrait of the ‘real BoJack Horseman’ makes him relevant again, but comes at the cost of seeing who he really is. Hence why series two – which sees him land his dream role, as race horse and childhood hero Secretariat – pivots around change and reinvention, and whether either is truly possible. Series three, which premieres on Netflix this Friday, functions better on an episodic level – there’s one episode, a dialogue-free riff on Lost in Translation, which is one of the show’s best – but is less united on an arc, instead retreading a fair amount of old ground. Still, there’s lots to love / make you stare deep into a mirror, with BoJack, now in line for an Oscar nomination, struggling to overcome the fact that no matter what he achieves, life will never feel meaningful. There are jokes too.
BoJack Horseman, of course, is not the first piece of fiction to explore Successful, Hard-drinking Men Who are Unhappy But are Not Quite Sure Why. The golden age of television was notable for its championing of the antihero; the difficult men like Tony Soprano and Don Draper, who lead lives of self-destruction; of rich, moral ambiguity. They’re assholes, but – especially in the case of Draper– they’re complicated, interesting assholes, almost aspirational assholes; the kind that tell you that it’s OK to be an asshole, that existential ennui excuses everything.
Yet unlike Mad Men, BoJack Horseman doesn’t wait until the final series to walk back his behaviour. It takes him to task from the very start. BoJack is a funny, likeable guy, maybe even – deep-down – a good one. But it doesn’t matter. BoJack Horseman functions on a philosophy of actions rather than words, of consequences and responsibility. It’s why his every act of pettiness adds up to affect him and the people around him. It’s why, when BoJack begs her to tell him he’s a good person, Diane replies with: “I don’t think I believe in ‘deep-down’. I think that all you are is just the things that you do.” Again, I should probably stress that there are many jokes in this show.
The emphasis on responsibility is what makes BoJack Horseman’s take on depression so interesting. It’s never explicitly said that BoJack is suffering from anything, but you can see the signs: the way he seems to sabotage anything helpful; the way he pushes people away, and then feels lonely; the way he goes through life barely present, often making him detached and cruel. It’s the sort of portrayal you rarely see on television, which usually paints depression in the broadest and most sympathetic of strokes. Depression, says BoJack Horseman, is not always about lying around all day and crying. It’s often about asking tough questions of who you really are.
In BoJack’s case, this means asking how responsible he is for his own behaviour. For depression can be an overwhelming disorder, one that distorts the world and betrays the mind. But unlike physical illness – which is blunt and clear-cut – mental illness is also nuanced and complex. And often, as is the case with BoJack, it’s difficult to distinguish between what is illness and what is personality. Is BoJack being horrible his own fault, or the result of something beyond his control – of a neglectful childhood, perhaps, or being ‘born broken’? Maybe both, but does it really make a difference? As Todd says in series three: “You can’t keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it OK… You are all the things that are wrong with you. It’s not the alcohol or the drugs or any of the shitty things that happen to you in your career or when you were a kid. It’s you.”
These questions – about the nature of choice, about what makes us who we are – are questions that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have been arguing over for the last 100 years. And here they are again, being asked in a show where the ‘D’ falls off the Hollywood sign so everyone just starts calling Hollywood ‘Hollywoo’ instead.
BoJack Horseman’s weighty, deconstructive approach to mental health has not sprung out of a vacuum. It’s representative of a wider shift in comedy; an approach towards unhappiness and depression that has grown sophisticated, as our real-life understanding deepens. We’ve moved away from uplifting, saccharine stories about people overcoming their sadness, and into stories of just trying to live with it; of coping and survival. US sitcom You’re The Worst follows the clinically depressed Gretchen, who insists she can’t be fixed. Surreal Netflix comedy Lady Dynamite charts the post-breakdown life of comedian Maria Banford. While in Channel 4’s dark comedy Flowers, Julian Barratt’s depressed children’s writer Maurice tells his wife, “I’m not unhappy because of you. This is just who I am and I don’t know how to change that. I don’t know what I can do to make it stop. Every morning I wake up and the first thing I think of is killing myself. I feel exhausted all the time. I find it impossible to gain any sort of pleasure from anything… It’s as if I’ve had a set amount of life assigned to me and I’ve used it all up. There’s nothing left.”
Writing for Vulture, Jenny Jaffe describes this trend as the sadcom: “the raw, honest, surprisingly hopeful, long-gestating progeny of M*A*S*H” – comedies like Louie, Rick and Morty and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, whose dark, humorous cynicism are offset by a sincere sense of optimism and heart. As a monkey says in BoJack Horseman, ‘Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day – that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.’ Maybe this is why unhappiness is better off explored through comedy – there’s a truth to it, a way to say more with less, a mix of textures closer to real life than any straight, miserable drama.
After all, if we didn’t laugh, we’d just cry.