Being reviewed:
BoJack Horseman
Advertisement
Near the end of the first season of Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, the title character—a gracelessly aging former sitcom star who’s also an anthropomorphic horse—asks his human biographer, Diane, a personal question at a public forum. He recognizes himself all too well in Diane’s sometimes-unflattering portrayal (the book’s title is One-Trick Pony) and wants her to tell him whether he is, or can be, a good person. “Do—do you think it’s too late for me?” he asks pleadingly. “I mean, am I just doomed to be the person that I am, the person in that book?” After an awkward silence, BoJack gets his answer not from Diane but from an audience member, in the form of a rhetorical question that recurs throughout the series: “Hey … aren’t you the horse from Horsin’ Around?” The episode ends, and the lyrics of the theme song echo his identification:
Back in the nineties
I was in a very famous TV show
I’m BoJack the Horseman (BoJack)
BoJack the Horseman, don’t act like you don’t know …
BoJack Horseman premiered ten years ago this month. Back in August 2014, the show seemed at first to fall into a familiar genre of mid-2010s TV—the animated anti-sitcom—but then, as the seasons continued, it came to resemble another: the prestige antihero drama. Like many fellow critical darlings from its era, BoJack Horseman kept coming back to the question of who its troubled male protagonist really is, deep down, and whether he can be redeemed. Eventually, five seasons later, Diane offers what seems to be the show’s answer to this earlier question in the last scene of the series. Instead of BoJack having an essential goodness or badness, she says, perhaps “all you are is just the things that you do.”
In hindsight, however, what’s distinctive and still potent about BoJack is not so much its answer to who BoJack or anyone else really is. Instead, the show still matters because of its recurring impulse to sidestep the question—as that audience member does in the first season—by focusing on the recognizable types that one belongs to: a horse, a celebrity, a sitcom dad. Over and over, the show feints at revealing a unique self, only to reiterate a type.
This bait-and-switch—asking questions about someone’s essential nature, then answering it with a fall back to types—is one of the show’s favorite devices, played to both comic and tragic effect. But it is also key to what this show has to say about what characters are and what we do with them. Many of its gags play on the generic qualities of both animals and celebrities, the way that both provide us with a shorthand for defining a type of person. By slyly invoking our preconceived expectations, the animal and celebrity characters on BoJack Horseman reveal how we rely on generic categories to make sense of TV characters, other people, and even ourselves.
At the same time, the dread behind BoJack’s question, confirmed by the audience member’s response, is about being trapped in a type (“the person in that book”): helplessly reenacting the same characteristic tendencies, offscreen as much as on. At one point he refers to himself as “a Xerox of a Xerox of a person,” raised by and later on television, lost in the images he projects and that others project onto him. And as the series progresses and its seasons take shape around BoJack’s self-destructive reversions to form—a familiar twelve-episode cycle from new start to old habits to new low—that menace of involuntarily falling into characteristic patterns takes on an increasingly concrete form: addiction.
Animality and celebrity are BoJack Horseman’s ways of seeing the type within the individual. Yet what the shows finds is addiction. After all, that is the form in which individual identity threatens to disappear into the repetition compulsion of an all-too-familiar type: the addict.
At first, BoJack’s drinking and drug use are played for laughs as typical vices of a Hollywood has-been. Over the course of the series, however, they are revealed as addictions, hidden in plain sight as shorthand TV characterization.
When BoJack’s addictions push him to the breaking point, his girlfriend and costar Gina at first suspects he’s getting too into character for a TV antihero role. Her misrecognition is telling. It discloses something uncannily like addiction in the logic of character, or at least the logic of character in an episodic, “bingeable” medium: as seen on “peak TV.”
How many of the prestige antihero dramas that BoJack both resembles and resists—The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire—might be understood as meditations on addiction, in which character appears as a compulsive reversion to type? (Meanwhile, on the other side of BoJack’s family tree, Homer Simpson’s bottomless thirst for Duff beer turned into the full-blown alcoholism of Archer and Rick & Morty: a progression from Rabelaisian gluttony to frank dependence, which BoJack’s own characterization effectively retraces.)
In hindsight, as the peak TV era winds down, the recognition behind Gina’s misrecognition feels like part of BoJack Horseman’s legacy. If narrative TV from “back in the nineties” until now has returned again and again to addiction, BoJack suggests, it’s because there’s something addiction-like in its models of characterization: the way that characters continually, even compulsively, reenact the traits and tendencies that define them from episode to episode.
Reversion to type is the key to both BoJack Horseman’s comedy and its melancholy, and to what it has to say about the streaming era it helped to inaugurate.
The first clue to BoJack Horseman’s recurring interest in type is hiding in plain sight: this is a world in which anthropomorphic animals and humans live side by side. Animals, as literary critic Heather Keenleyside observes, often serve as a way to think about kinds of people.1 These are the parts that animals play in fables, or what we mean when we call someone a shark, a puppy dog, or a snake. BoJack Horseman delights in making the anthropomorphic leap from species to character type over and over again.
Many of the show’s throwaway jokes involve animals in quasi-human form acting true to their natures, which is another way of saying acting true to type. That “nature” can be completely proverbial or fabular, as when a wolf in a shirt that reads “SHEEP” chats up a sheep at a party: the animal characters in BoJack Horseman draw at least as much on the symbolic lives of creatures as on their actual behavior in the wild. A memorable early gag even pokes fun at the show’s tendency to let animal traits stand in for human types, with all their conventional value-bearing shorthand: BoJack’s feline agent, Princess Carolyn, is venting about fellow agent Vanessa Gekko, “That slimy, slippery, cold-blooded, bug-eyed …” who then appears right behind her. But instead of a lizard, Vanessa turns out to be a human: a sly reminder of how the animal tropes that the show takes literally are also deeply ingrained in our vocabulary for other people.
Much like BoJack himself, the other characters in BoJack Horseman often seem powerless over their own natures—and for the animal characters, this usually involves their species nature. Often helplessness repetition of their species propensities is part of the gag: BoJack’s frenemy and fellow former sitcom star, yellow lab Mr. Peanutbutter, can’t control his loathing of the mailman or his urge to shake when wet.
But at times animality becomes a melancholy figure for what characters can’t change about themselves, like the leopard’s proverbial spots. Princess Carolyn, for instance, is torn throughout the series between her desire for love and her need for independence. The show plays this conflict straight and often quite sensitively, but it’s also a deeply typical one—both for professional female characters on television and for cats. In BoJack Horseman’s world, “species” is another name for the habits and desires so deep-rooted that it seems impossible to be rid of them, or to imagine oneself without them.
By invoking our preconceived expectations, the animal and celebrity characters on “BoJack Horseman” reveal how we rely on generic categories to make sense of TV characters, other people, and even ourselves.
Speaking of Vanessa Gekko, Mr. Peanutbutter, and Princess Carolyn, some funny things happen to names in this show, especially but not exclusively with its animal characters. Proper names are supposed to mark out an individual person rather than signify a type (the realist novel’s Robinson Crusoe or Dorothea Brooke, as opposed to allegory’s Christian or Everyman), but BoJack Horseman’s play with names reveals just how generic and convention-bound this signature of individuality can be.
“Mr. Peanutbutter” and “Princess Carolyn,” for instance, tweak our expectations by refusing to separate cleanly into personal name, family name, and title. Further, by echoing the anthropomorphizing mock titles we sometimes give to pets, these mock names remind us that their wearers are, respectively, a dog and a cat. Princess Carolyn’s response to a dirtbag boyfriend’s pleas of “Carolyn!”—“My name is Princess Carolyn!”—is equal parts satisfying and incoherent, her housecat’s mock honorific at once echoing and undercutting her proud assertion of individuality. Proper names, ironically, are all alike in their convention-bound arbitrariness; improper names fix characters to their types in distinctive, sometimes dismissive ways.
The name of both the show and the star similarly mimics the form of a proper name while remaining slightly off. If BoJack is, as he claims, “a Xerox of a Xerox of a person,” his name likewise scans as a blurry approximation of what a name should look like—reminiscent of the fake American names in the 1994 Japanese video game “Fighting Baseball” that occasionally make the rounds on social media, like “Bobson Dugnutt” and “Sleve McDichael.”2 BoJack’s two first names, separately capitalized but jammed together without a space or hyphen, add up to less than one, while the surname “Horseman” mimics the form of an occupation name like “Smith” or “Baker,” even while turning its echo of generic identity into something far more literal: a man who’s also a horse. (Cue the outro music.)
That generic quality of BoJack’s name comes not only from its hint at his species identity but also from the fact that everyone in the show’s universe seems to know it. Celebrities are an odd mix of uniqueness and typicality: they’re celebrated as exceptional individuals, but a key part of their cultural function is to embody types, both onscreen and off. The people we see on TV—both fictional characters and celebrity personas—offer labels for the rest of us to categorize them, one another, and ourselves. As a result, BoJack’s desire to know what kind of person he is runs into a cruel circularity: the world around him, like that audience member, answers by mirroring his public image back to him.
From early on, BoJack Horseman plays with the way that celebrity makes identity repeatable. In the show’s third episode, a TV host known only as “A Ryan Seacrest Type” guides us through the career arc of BoJack’s TV daughter Sarah Lynn, who tries to break out of her innocent waif image with a raunchy pop album, only to be replaced twelve years later by the next teen sex idol. The very thing that makes celebrities economically and sentimentally valuable—being quite literally one of a kind—is also what constrains them (typecasting), makes them imitable and reproducible (“A Ryan Seacrest Type”) and ultimately replaceable.
The very next episode, “Zoës and Zeldas,” has Diane’s ex-boyfriend Wayne, a BuzzFeed writer, sorting the world into two kinds of people based on characters from Mr. Peanutbutter’s Horsin’ Around copycat Mr. Peanutbutter’s House: Zeldas are bubbly extroverts, Zoës are morose and introverted cynics. BoJack’s refusal of the premise gets him labeled a Zoë, to the amusement of all parties except him; even the gesture of refusing to be classified, as Aaron Kunin writes of the misanthrope, can mark one’s membership in a type.3 The episode, like BoJack’s arc as a whole, resolves into the question of whether people have an essential nature and whether it can be changed, but note the terms in which that question is posed here: a TV star is being assigned a personality derived from a broad character on a TV show, which was itself derived from his own TV show, on which he had played a similarly broad character known simply as “The Horse.”
It’s roughly akin to asking whether Kim Cattrall is a Samantha, or asserting that Daniel Radcliffe is really (as his BoJack cameo imagines) more of a Slytherin. How can the people who instantiate types for others make sense of themselves?
Just as the first step to regaining control in twelve-step programs is admitting powerlessness, the first step to reclaiming your individuality is to identify as a type: an addict or alcoholic. The addictions that eventually drive BoJack into rehab at first appear as a joke on the types that define his character, a cross between a horse’s proverbial appetite and clichés of Hollywood excess. In the very first episode BoJack fixes himself a carrot, vodka, and pills breakfast smoothie; a few episodes later Princess Carolyn pulls him out of a madcap bender to act in a bourbon commercial, calling it “the part you were born to play.”
But if that’s a punchline in Season 1, by Season 3 it sounds more like the verdict BoJack fears: that it’s his nature to be an addict. Or put another way, that it’s his nature to repeat his addictive patterns and to transmit them to others.
In an episode from the middle of that third season, BoJack finds out that a brand of heroin has been named after him (riffing on the slang term “horse”). That discovery clears him in an overdose death—the victim’s final text, “BoJack is going to kill me,” was actually in reference to the drug—but it sets up another: Sarah Lynn overdoses on BoJack-brand heroin after he tempts her into a relapse.
Who or what is responsible for Sarah Lynn’s death: BoJack the horse or BoJack the heroin? Part of what haunts him, it seems, is how readily the former collapses into the latter. The heroin is a mass-produced product that refashions its users, through repeated behavior, into echoes of the same familiar type—into which BoJack himself repeatedly falls. In borrowing BoJack’s name to trope on his species identity and his celebrity image, the heroin brand mocks the name’s promise of individuality: where the proper name claims to mark out a singular self, a brand offers repeatability and an identity in which consumers can participate (in this case at enormous personal cost). Addiction, for BoJack, is the type as parasite, denaturing its host as it jumps from one to another.
Aside from BoJack himself, the show’s most fitting emblem for addiction is an anonymous (or Anonymous) minor character who sums up both the comedy and the melancholy of type. In the episode where Sarah Lynn dies, near the midpoint of the series, she and BoJack drunkenly crash an AA meeting. At this meeting of addicts, the speaker resembles one of those mechanical drinking birds. And this, in turn, implies that the bird is powerless over his drinking, because after all, he’s a machine designed to drink.
Like so much in BoJack, the mechanical drinking bird-addict is a visual gag. But it is also more, staging a collision between Henri Bergson’s theory of comedy (or René Descartes’ of the animal)—the disclosure of something mechanical and generic in an apparently organic form—and the mortifying admission of the First Step.
To call this minor character BoJack’s double isn’t quite right. Instead, the drinking bird seems to symbolize the alienating repeatability of character itself. Perhaps the show’s repeated use of type to sidestep the question of identity is another, more unsettling version of Diane’s answer. If you are the things that you do, then identity might be the thing you can’t help but repeat. 
This article was commissioned by Nicholas Dames.
- Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). ↩
- Jane C. Hu, “Bask in the Joy of Made-Up American Baseball Players’ Names from a 1994 Japanese Nintendo Game,” Slate, April 27, 2020, https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/mlbpa-baseball-nintendo-japan-player-names.html. ↩
- Aaron Kunin, Character as Form (Bloomsbury, 2019), 93–106. ↩
