‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and BoJack Horseman Explore the Emptiness of Success’

One of my favorite television shows I’ve watched in the last year or two is none other than Netflix’s ‘Bojack Horseman’, an oddball cartoon featuring a talking horse who once starred in the show’s ‘Full House’ equivalent, rose to stardom, and found the life of a celebrity to be both totally devoid of happiness and equally inescapable.

The show is, to put it lightly, dark as heck, and it reveals the glaring truth that celebrities are broken humans, just like anyone else — and that fame can be a major dilemma, not an opportunity.

Sarah Seltzer wrote an excellent article highlighting how the ‘emptiness of success’ is becoming a major theme in our contemporary narratives, and for good reason. Using Bojack and the ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ protagonist Rebecca Bunch as examples, Seltzer has this to say:

The obvious connection between the two shows is their difficult yet charismatic protagonists who suffer from mental illness: Both Rebecca and BoJack experience depression and anxiety, numb themselves with food and substances, and are relentless self-saboteurs, constantly scheming to solve their problems through outsize gestures (sometimes generous ones) and shenanigans rather than confronting them head on.

During the course of these schemes, they both throw around buckets of money and charm, which reminds us that their success is intertwined with their depression. These plotlines suggest that on the other side of getting everything you want, there’s likely a gaping abyss — and it’s that abyss that might propel the characters’ quests to be winners. Elisa Albert examined this paradox in her recent essay, “The Snarling Girl,” for Hazlitt. “So you got what you wanted and now you want something else,” she writes. “If you have ever spent any time around seriously ambitious people, you know that they are very often some of the unhappiest crazies alive, forever rooting around for more, having a hard time with basics like breathing and eating and sleeping, forever trying to cover some hysterical imagined nakedness.” This sounds a lot like both BoJack and Rebecca at their lowest moments.

This is a side of celebrity that is often completely hidden, as the glamour of it all is an easy sell to an unsuspecting public. ‘Bojack Horseman’ takes this even further by focusing on the child celebrities the protagonist once shared the screen with, now decades older and living completely bleak existences.

Bojack himself, a selfish playboy teetering the line between working and washed-up actor, commits himself to serious roles not because he’s passionate about the films, but because he decides that awards and accolades might bring him the happiness he’s always lacked. Yet, as Seltzer continues:

Indeed, after BoJack receives his coveted Oscar nomination, he freaks out: “I feel… the same,” he says. It’s a moment that sums up the core theme of the show: the fruitless search for the panacea that will make you validated, happy, or even just ok with mortality and transience. “I can’t keep asking myself ‘Am I happy?’ It just makes me more miserable,” BoJack’s foil, journalist Diane Nguyen, tells him early in Season 3. “I don’t know If I believe in it, real lasting happiness. All those perky, well-adjusted people you see in movies and TV shows? I don’t think they exist.”

A bleak (but important) exploration of fame and its meaningless nature. Important work.