Real Life and BoJack Horseman
About two months ago a coworker told me that he thought I’d like BoJack Horseman a Netflix original series. Despite the two-and-a-half-stars that Netflix estimated for me, I loved it — and then remembered I use my sister’s Netflix account. Having watched both available seasons twice through I’ve become curious with why I like the show. This is the byproduct of exercising that curiosity muscle.
There’s a small backstory. Immediately after I failed Discrete Mathematics for the second time I emailed the English Department advisor and asked if I could get an appointment the next morning to change my major. He said: “It’s ridiculously late to be changing majors. You should have taken care of this 8–10 weeks ago. I have two appointments available tomorrow”. Hours later I sat down with my new advisor to pick classes for the summer semester that started on Monday.
One of those classes was a Shakespeare seminar taught by a visiting professor. With a class of 14 it was essentially a seminar where we spend 80 minutes talking about the assigned reading in an assigned play. The first was A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I didn’t like it. I complained in class that I found the characters one dimensional and inauthentic. I felt there was limited opportunity to peer inside and get the inner workings of what made the characters tick. They felt like vapid words on a page. A (now) friend of mine Lauren retorted at me in class: “How do you deal with real life then?”. The best answer I had then (and for some time) was “poorly”.
Enter BoJack Horseman. The show addresses the perils of understanding and dealing with real life by continually providing the only reasonable answer: life is hard. That it does this without any insider information(sans one drug trip) reels me in.
The lead character BoJack Horseman gets to being The BoJack Horseman from being the star of a 1990s era (fictional) sitcom Horsin’ Around. In the very first episode, we find BoJack in an interview, drunk, trying to answer the question of why Horsin’ Around was successful:
“[S]ometimes when you get home from a long hard day of getting kicked in the urethra you just want to watch a show about good likable people who love each other. Where, you know, no matter what happens at the end of thirty minutes everything’s gonna turn out ok.”
Desire for escape from the mundane isn’t something new that’s brought on by our increasingly digital world either — Shakespeare catered to it as well. Michael Taylor notes that in all of Shakespeare’s comedies “it is impossible to imagine any other outcome than the restoration or establishment of harmony”(The Darker Purpose of a Midsummer Night’s Dream). It’s human nature to want resolve rather than continued tension. So much else of consumable media has been successful for precisely this reason — from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Modern Family.
As viewers we expect to have the same association with BoJack that viewers in the show’s world have with Horsin’ Around — or any real world sitcom — where we can treat the 30 minute experience as an escape. The creator of Horsin’ Around even remarks “This is a situation comedy! No one watches the show to feel feelings. Life is depressing enough already!”(S2E1). However, with BoJack we can’t really escape feelings. You’re watching a TV show where characters also escape through sitcoms and comedies — it’s a thin disguise of the fact that we’re watching ourselves. BoJack leaps from computer screen and inhabits real life and like the sad reality, there are no happy endings, worthwhile catchphrases or any insinuation that all will be well. The show is so eager and willing to force viewers experience stomach churning angst that it also gets real meaning through.
Where this relates to Lauren’s comment is here: one of the themes in the first series is BoJack’s desire for his memoir to show that he is a good person. He asks his memoirist if she thinks he’s really a good person but her answer is one of fact and appearances: “I don’t think I believe in ‘deep down’. I think that all you are is just the things that you do.”(S1E12). Actions and words are really the only tools that anyone of us has. BoJack, being somewhat relatable, later comments: “I assumed there’s more to me tan everyone thought, but, maybe there isn’t”.
He does wind up being happy with the memoir but only because of the full-sided story it tells: “[w]hen people find out that someone like [BoJack], who seems larger than life, is actually just as wounded and vulnerable as they are, it makes them feel less lonely”(S1E11). Really, the Full Story is all that’s worth telling.
