Season 4 of BoJack Horseman aired on Netflix this past autumn, and if you’ve yet to be pointed in its very particular direction you’re in for a treat. It’s the latest in the long line of animated, adult dramedies that stretches back to South Park (reviewed earlier here), King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead and of course the Simpsons.
Ensconced in his hilltop, penthouse apartment in the mythical LA suburb of Hollywoo, BoJack is a washed-up hasbeen who used to the star of the squeaky-clean sitcom Horsin’ Around, who spends his days in a drug-fuelled, alcoholic haze of privileged self-pity.
The show’s stiletto humour stems from two sources. On the one hand, it’s a gloriously acerbic picking apart of the media landscape as the worlds of film, television and publishing are gleefully trashed. Brilliantly barbed one liners are fired back and forth with sarcastic brio, in the way that was supposed to have been done in the, whisper it, disappointingly overrated His Girl Friday.
And on the other, half of the characters are, by the bye, animals. So Bojack is in fact an actual horse. But his stoner houseguest Todd is a 20 something guy, and Diane, his soulmate and ghost writer is a 20 something girl. She though is married to BoJack’s best frenemy Mr. Peanutbutter, who’s a golden Labrador. And his agent Princess Caroline is a cat, who later hooks up with a wealthy mouse, heir to the Stilton Hotel fortune. What all this allows for is some fantastically laboured puns and slapstick, together with a plethora of ridiculously elaborate setups that eventually produce wonderfully silly pay-offs.
All of which would be enjoyable enough. But what really elevates the series is the emotional depth and complexity that they manage to reap from the soapy storylines that they hang all this on. They do this, as Emily Nussbaum writes in her piece in the New Yorker here, by expanding the show’s horizons from season 2 on, by giving each of the protagonists their own storylines, instead of just focusing on BoJack, as they do in season 1. So you end up being as invested in Todd, Diane, Princess Caroline and even Mr Peanuttbutter, as you do in BoJack.
The result is both the funniest, and the most engaging show currently being aired anywhere on television. And it’s hard not to conclude that its showrunner and chief writer Raphael Bob Waksberg is some sort of a latter day Dorothy Parker. If you’ve yet to sample its delights, then by all means begin at the beginning, with season 1. But be warned, it gets significantly better from season 2 on.
You can see the trailer for season 4 of BoJack Horseman here. And here’s a 10 minute compilation of some of the funniest bits from season 2 here.
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