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RANT: I almost liked BoJack Horseman, then THIS happened
4 months ago
(MILD SPOILERS.)
After recommendations from some of my co-workers, I checked out "BoJack Horseman," the adult cartoon on Netflix about a washed-up 90s TV star (who is a horse.)
This was originally going to be a positive review. I thought this was a show about characters who are varying degrees of messed up all playing off each other, satirizing the absurdities and complexities of modern life. It had a good sense of when to play the dark material for laughs and when to play it straight. Not every joke landed, but the ones that did were pretty funny.
The show takes place in a world with both humans and anthropomorphic animals. I like the stylized character designs. I even like how the characters turn their heads from a side view to a front view in just one frame of animation. It reminds me of a low-frame-rate furry animated GIF -- in a good way.
The voice cast is great. And it's even got a cool, funky opening theme sequence.
As I was looking up some info on the show, I avoided spoilers. I haven't been invested enough in a show to care about spoilers in a long time.
I was even going to praise how the show handled topical material, in contrast to all the recent heavy-handed media. For example, there's a flashback about how the creator of BoJack's old TV show, "Horsin' Around," was fired for being gay and BoJack didn't stand up for him. That's representing a societal issue, but BoJack and the creator Herb are both well-established characters. It felt personal.
So what happened?
The same thing that always happens with entertainment these days.
You know, you've been burned by so many shows, you don't know if you'll ever love again. Then, you finally meet a show that seems nice. Well, maybe not *nice*...but interesting. You start to open up to it. But then it turns out it's just like all those other shows. They're only after one thing. And you just feel so used and dirty.
In Season 2, there's an episode called "Chickens." That's not the episode that broke me, but it was a red flag. It's a vegetarian anti-meat episode. Ironically, I was eating chicken while I watched it. But I let it pass. I told myself, it's unreasonable to expect a show will never raise these kinds of issues. Plus, there was still some good comedy in the subplots.
Then came "Hank After Dark." This episode is about BoJack's biographer, Diane Nguyen, trying to expose a beloved TV personality known as "Uncle Hanky" as a sexual predator. Now, let me say, if you're writing a dark satire of Hollywood, it would be bizarre if you *didn't* address this subject. I thought the show was handling it with relative nuance. Then came the final scene of the episode. Diane is in an airport, visibly upset over what's happening with Uncle Hanky when some random dude turns to her and tells her to smile. Because men are always telling women they should smile. This is such a cliche. I didn't like the chicken episode, but it at least delivered its message in a weird, unique way. This is just...here's your cliche! I'm not saying this hasn't ever happened to a woman in real life. Like, I'm sure at some point an atheist has prayed during a life-and-death situation, but that doesn't mean I like it when that scenario turns up in religious propaganda and this is the same to me. I feel like that one scene recontextualized not only the entire episode, but the entire series. It seemed like it was all building to this. This wasn't about satirizing the absurdities and complexities of modern life -- it was about promoting an "--ism." Just like everything else. Nothing drives me up the wall like an irreverent comedy that's actually super reverent about something.
It also recontextualized Diane, one of the main characters. I now saw her as a stand-in for the activist writers. Looking back on the episode, one sign that it was propaganda is that while the public hates and threatens Diane for her opinions on Uncle Hanky, she receives no support from other Feminists. There *are* seemingly no other Feminists. This is, again, similar to religious propaganda films that take place in an American town where the protaganists are the only Christians.
Not to go too extreme on this, but...Hollywood entertainment is DEAD. There is only propaganda. Even if it seems like it's entertainment, it's just a trick. I'm not watching the rest of the show. I probably won't watch another narrative-driven show for a long time. At least not an American one. That's one of the reasons I'm so into furry art, like on this site, because it's actually made to entertain people.
After recommendations from some of my co-workers, I checked out "BoJack Horseman," the adult cartoon on Netflix about a washed-up 90s TV star (who is a horse.)
This was originally going to be a positive review. I thought this was a show about characters who are varying degrees of messed up all playing off each other, satirizing the absurdities and complexities of modern life. It had a good sense of when to play the dark material for laughs and when to play it straight. Not every joke landed, but the ones that did were pretty funny.
The show takes place in a world with both humans and anthropomorphic animals. I like the stylized character designs. I even like how the characters turn their heads from a side view to a front view in just one frame of animation. It reminds me of a low-frame-rate furry animated GIF -- in a good way.
The voice cast is great. And it's even got a cool, funky opening theme sequence.
As I was looking up some info on the show, I avoided spoilers. I haven't been invested enough in a show to care about spoilers in a long time.
I was even going to praise how the show handled topical material, in contrast to all the recent heavy-handed media. For example, there's a flashback about how the creator of BoJack's old TV show, "Horsin' Around," was fired for being gay and BoJack didn't stand up for him. That's representing a societal issue, but BoJack and the creator Herb are both well-established characters. It felt personal.
So what happened?
The same thing that always happens with entertainment these days.
You know, you've been burned by so many shows, you don't know if you'll ever love again. Then, you finally meet a show that seems nice. Well, maybe not *nice*...but interesting. You start to open up to it. But then it turns out it's just like all those other shows. They're only after one thing. And you just feel so used and dirty.
In Season 2, there's an episode called "Chickens." That's not the episode that broke me, but it was a red flag. It's a vegetarian anti-meat episode. Ironically, I was eating chicken while I watched it. But I let it pass. I told myself, it's unreasonable to expect a show will never raise these kinds of issues. Plus, there was still some good comedy in the subplots.
Then came "Hank After Dark." This episode is about BoJack's biographer, Diane Nguyen, trying to expose a beloved TV personality known as "Uncle Hanky" as a sexual predator. Now, let me say, if you're writing a dark satire of Hollywood, it would be bizarre if you *didn't* address this subject. I thought the show was handling it with relative nuance. Then came the final scene of the episode. Diane is in an airport, visibly upset over what's happening with Uncle Hanky when some random dude turns to her and tells her to smile. Because men are always telling women they should smile. This is such a cliche. I didn't like the chicken episode, but it at least delivered its message in a weird, unique way. This is just...here's your cliche! I'm not saying this hasn't ever happened to a woman in real life. Like, I'm sure at some point an atheist has prayed during a life-and-death situation, but that doesn't mean I like it when that scenario turns up in religious propaganda and this is the same to me. I feel like that one scene recontextualized not only the entire episode, but the entire series. It seemed like it was all building to this. This wasn't about satirizing the absurdities and complexities of modern life -- it was about promoting an "--ism." Just like everything else. Nothing drives me up the wall like an irreverent comedy that's actually super reverent about something.
It also recontextualized Diane, one of the main characters. I now saw her as a stand-in for the activist writers. Looking back on the episode, one sign that it was propaganda is that while the public hates and threatens Diane for her opinions on Uncle Hanky, she receives no support from other Feminists. There *are* seemingly no other Feminists. This is, again, similar to religious propaganda films that take place in an American town where the protaganists are the only Christians.
Not to go too extreme on this, but...Hollywood entertainment is DEAD. There is only propaganda. Even if it seems like it's entertainment, it's just a trick. I'm not watching the rest of the show. I probably won't watch another narrative-driven show for a long time. At least not an American one. That's one of the reasons I'm so into furry art, like on this site, because it's actually made to entertain people.
That show in particular does seek to entertain it just doesn't pull it's punches especially with the character Diane, a made your choice. you made your choice but I say continue it
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11179622/
That's what I thought at first, that all the characters were supposed to be various types of messed up, played for dark comedy. After watching that one episode that lost me, I also talked to one of my co-workers who loves the show (who is a nice guy) and he said how much he identifies with Diane and I also heard him tell someone else how "anyone who thinks BoJack is the hero is watching the show wrong." (He also says he identifies strongly with Lisa Simpson.) I also saw a comic that similarly suggested DudeBros would watch thinking BoJack was the hero and that they'd be in for some sort of delightful rude awakening in the later seasons. I don't think I'd have much to gain from this lesson, since I didn't think any character was "the hero."
I did watch the next episode and I think it helped that Diane wasn't in it. I don't feel angry at the show anymore, I just feel more like I lost interest. But I may pick it up again at some point. I do appreciate hearing that Diane is deliberately like that and isn't simply supposed to be a self-insert for the writers/role model for the audience.
I recently watched a very different live-action dark comedy called "Why Women Kill." It was deliberately kind of pulpy, but it was also juicy. It's the first time in a while I've seen a recent show that's juicy.