Is Bojack Horseman Racist?
Using Data Science to dissect the character set of this incredibly unique show
In the age of political correctness and inclusivity, the TV and film industry undergoes frequent inspection for gender and race representation. The Hollywood Diversity Report confirms that the film industry still suffers from underrepresentation.
It’s a little different for Bojack Horseman, the show features humans and anthropomorphic animals living side by side. With the show’s final season premiering Oct. 25th, I thought it would be interesting to check if the show overrepresents or underrepresents certain species. I wanted to find out if Bojack Horseman is speciesist.
Approach
The basic idea is to compare the ratio of each species from the show to that of the real world and check for variances. At first, I compared against whole-world animal populations but then decided to limit the comparison to United States’ populations, as the show is predominantly set there, in Hollywoo, LA.
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I also narrowed down the comparison to 7 species:
- Humans
- Horses
- Dogs
- Cats
- Deer
- Bears
- Sheep
Results
The analysis shows obvious disproportion between the Bojack universe and the real world.
From this simple multi-bar chart, we can quickly see that Humans and Horses are overrepresented in the show, while Cats and Dogs are underrepresented.
I went a step further and plotted only the variances.
With this chart, the disproportion is clearer:
- Humans are overrepresented by ~20%
- Dogs and cats are underrepresented by ~10%
- Horses, deer, bears, and sheep fall within a ±5% margin
The numbers are not super crazy, but I’d say they’re significant enough to brand this show a speciesist.
*strikes gavel*
Another interesting finding here is that although the show is eponymously about a horse, human characters dominate the show with a whopping 112 characters as opposed to only 9 horses. That’s almost 13:1!
The Data Science bit
These are the main steps:
- I used BeautifulSoup to scrape the character data from the Bojack Horsman fandom wiki.
- I created a new dataset with the count of each species.
- I used various online resources to get US populations of the top species featured in the show and added that column to the dataset.
- I scaled each column.
- I used Matplotlib to plot the comparison charts.
For the complete code, check out my Jupyter Notebook.
Final Thoughts
Underrepresentation in media is a serious issue. This article is not meant to undermine that in any way. This, however, is a light-hearted exploration of a nuanced show that I grew to like very much and one that I will undoubtedly miss.
Here’s to a great final season!
