If you’ve logged into Netflix this past week or so, you may have noticed there’s a new animated show that looks like the facebook photos from that one weird friend of yours that bought and wears a horse head mask… and the show is called “BoJack Horseman.”
Here’s the trailer for this new animated show “BoJack Horseman”
Then you start watching. And you hear some familiar voices, Will Arnett’s Marlboro Country voice brings the titular character of “BoJack” to life. He’s the perfect person for the character. Bojack has all the best and worst features of Arnett’s catalog of characters. But there’s much much more to him than just “G.O.B.” in Horseface.
Next we meet Todd, the Kato Kaelin of show. He’s just some guy that sleeps on BoJack’s couch, subtly voiced by Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, the character seems like a throw away sidekick. “Princess Carolyn” portrayed by Amy Sedaris is BoJack’s off again on again lover / agent, and his best frenemy “Mr Peanut Butter” played by Paul F. Thompkins and Alison Brie as “Diane” rounds out the main cast, with additional voices from Patton Oswalt and several others from the Alt comedy world as reoccurring roles.
BoJack Horseman lives large in his swanky pad in the Hollywoo(d) Hills, that has a great view of the Hollywoo(d) sign, in a way that seems fairly unlikely if you’re familiar with Los Angeles actual geography (as with the view from Princess Carolyn’s office view of the Malibu coast, when the building is the middle of the city around Mid-Wilshire). BoJack was the star of network sitcom “Horsin’ Around,” with a fairly trite premise, a bachelor winds up having to raise several random children. Which not-coincidentally happens to be the same premise of his friend’s show “Mr Peanut Butter’s House”only he’s raising twin girls. Oh, Network TV… how the 90s were such simpler times. But now he’s burned most of the bridges in town, he’s gotten a bit fat, has a wee bit of a drinking problem and he’s a few… months behind in his autobiography and has burned through his advance, so he hires a ghost writer, “Diane” (Alison Brie) to put his life on the page.
The Los Angeles of “BoJack Horseman” is similar to the New York of “Ugly Americans” as are the art styles, where anthropomorphic animals live and work side by side with normal humans, only no one makes any big deal about it. BoJack isn’t a guy with a horsehead mask, he’s a horse that walks on two legs, and has a KanYe West level ego. The absurdity is nonchalant, and you quickly get past how there’s almost more animal people than people people. Los Angeles is a melting pot.
Where the show gets you, after it establishes the characters, is how real it is. Yes, there is the occasional Family Guy-esque cutaway for an odd joke or sight gag, but at its heart, it’s Louie meets Entourage in the best way possible. You see the the day-to-day of Hollywood, and it’s also character driven. BoJack starts to fall in love with his biographer, Diane, and doesn’t understand that he’s not actually in love with her as the person. she’s merely a cypher for everyone else’s ego. She’s from Boston, and in an episode she takes BoJack home with her to visit her family to find her sports obsessed brothers just put icepacks on their recently deceased father, in his chair on the other side of the living room, because they were too busy watching a tape of a Baseball game from ’86, to actually do something. Everything falls onto Diane’s shoulders, at home in Boston, with BoJack as well as her boyfriend, Mr Peanut Butter, who marries her, because he thinks that what she wants, and we follow several episodes of BoJack attempting to woo her, because he feels like he’s in love with her because she listens to him.
Towards the end of the season, they set the jokes to the backburner and we get to delve deeper into BoJack’s past, he gets a call from his friend who announces he has cancer, and BoJack has to go to Malibu to visit, but doesn’t want to as its been twenty years since they last saw eachother and it hadn’t ended well. The latter part of the season gets down right poignant when BoJack is forced to deal with his mortality and goes on a drug fueled bender after disapproving of the manuscript Diane submitted to his publisher, claiming he can write a better book by the weekend, but he ends up accepting.
The show also plays around with words quite a bit, like when BoJack gets into PR war with a Navy SEAL who is actually a Seal, and when BoJack’s agent gets him a job for an Herbal German Bourbon commercial, word play worthy of Arrested Development. Despite the show’s rocky first few episodes, as the series progresses it gets better and better, delving into heart of the fickle mistress that is fame. BoJack Horseman is a helluva show. It would have been right at home on adultswim, or possibly FXX but with NetFlix, you’re able to binge the whole 12 episode run over a day or so, which you’ll be glad you did.
BoJack Horseman is an animated sitcom, created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and stars Will Arnett as the title character BoJack Horseman and co-stars Amy Sedaris, Alison Brie, Paul F. Tompkins, and Aaron Paul. Check it out on Netflix here www.netflix.com/BoJack_Horseman
