Tag: pop culture

Will Arnett used to leave BoJack Horseman recording sessions feeling disoriented. He’d step outside a dark Hollywoo(d) studio blinded by late-morning sunlight. As he walked to his car, he’d start to sweat. The caffeine from the coffee he’d just drunk would buck in his empty stomach. All the while, he’d be struggling to shake his character’s pathologically antisocial behavior. “This guy’s just been really shitty to someone in some fucked-up scenario,” Arnett says. “And I’m like, ‘What? How am I going to go on with the rest of my day?’”

Hey, that’s life as the voice of a depressed, self-loathing, alcoholic, anthropomorphic horse: Occasionally, you sink into the depths with him. “There were days where I’d come home really bummed out, and I’d be like, ‘What is life, man?’” says Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the show’s creator. “And I’d go to work the next day like, ‘Oh, right. I’m watching this really depressing episode all day.’ It’s seeping into my brain.”

On first look, BoJack Horseman was a satirical story of a washed-up sitcom star desperate to be famous again. But it was more than the tale of one unhappy equine. It was an existential comedy about people, some of whom happen to be animals, figuring out how to live without letting their piled-up baggage weigh them down. “That’s just such a unique point of view: to realize that each day, we get out of bed and we have a certain amount of damage that we are all either trying to protect our friends and colleagues from or protect ourselves from,” says executive producer Steven A. Cohen. From the beginning, it was clear that in the show’s world, like in the real world, damage can’t be reversed. When the ottoman in BoJack’s living room catches fire, it stays burned out in every subsequent episode. “Things like that, which were such small pitches at the time, were showstoppers,” Cohen adds. “Because you’re like, ‘That’s the way life is.’”

There were dozens of smart and funny animated series in the decades before it, but BoJack Horseman was different: It was built for prestige TV. It had a hard-to-pull-for antihero as toxic as Tony Soprano or Don Draper, an anti-feel-good sensibility, a unique visual style, and the ear of critics. But even while exploring serious topics—the Wikipedia page lists 12 hot-button issues it covered, and that’s a low estimate—the adult cartoon didn’t veer into self-seriousness. And it could’ve come about only during the brief time in the early 2010s when media conglomerates, in pursuit of building big streaming platforms, were willing to take chances on quirky ideas. Today, the show about a horse would be considered, well, a unicorn.

Over six seasons, BoJack got really real, really often. Yet as heavy as it was, it had a unique knack for finding room for jokes. “That’s one of the things I’m proud of with the show, is that 77 episodes deep, it was still really silly and goofy and cartoony while also being very dramatic and melancholy and intense the whole way through,” Bob-Waksberg says. “I never felt like we could choose one tone. It was always kind of both things.” BoJack tapped into an eternal truth: When you’re drowning, sometimes the only thing you can do to stay afloat is laugh at your predicament.

Late in the first season of the show, there’s a flashback to a fresh-faced BoJack and his friend and creative partner Herb Kazzaz—whom BoJack later screws over—sharing a moment at the Griffith Observatory. They look out at Los Angeles, and Herb says, “I see a city that you and I will run someday. And when we’re both famous and have everything we’ve ever wanted, we’ll come back here together and high-five.”

The scene, more or less, was ripped from Bob-Waksberg’s life. When he was new to L.A., he’d hike Griffith with friends, look out at the city, and snarkily wonder about the future. “We used to say, tongue planted firmly in cheek, ‘Someday we’re going to own this town,’” he says. “That was the thing we would do. We were like characters on Entourage.” Or The Lion King. “One day,” he adds with faux gravitas, “everything the light touches will be yours, Simba.”

That was a decade and a half ago. Back then, Bob-Waksberg would’ve laughed in the face of anyone who told him that his success was preordained. The dream of BoJack Horseman was alive, but in the way a zombie is alive. “BoJack was the development that wouldn’t die,” he says. “It was like two years I was bouncing around this thing, and there were points where I was like, ‘Why am I still spending time on this?’”

Bob-Waksberg was working on the project with Tornante, the studio founded by former Walt Disney chairman Michael Eisner. His spec script had initially impressed two development executives at the company, Cohen and Noel Bright. “In this town, everything starts with somebody sending us something to read,” Cohen says. “And the very first thing we read of his … it’s from the same writer today. You can see the hallmarks. He’s just a gifted storyteller.”

Cohen and Bright quickly set up a meeting with Bob-Waksberg. “When you sit with Raphael, he’s just as gifted in person, and you can see his brain working and when he’s excited, because his body starts moving and his hands start moving,” Cohen says. That day, Bob-Waksberg, hands in motion, told them a story about the time he went to a beautiful home in Laurel Canyon for a party that, to him, was anything but festive. “He was feeling completely alone and divorced from the magic reality that is Hollywood,” Cohen says, “and realizing like, ‘What does this all mean? And who are these people?’ … It’s 10 years later, and I don’t have those answers. And that’s uniquely Raphael, to just basically provoke you into thinking about something for 10 years.”

Eisner didn’t go to the meeting. “It was not Steven Spielberg,” he says with a smile. Afterward, though, he briefly met Bob-Waksberg and asked what show he was pitching. “Just tell me in one or two sentences the best idea,” Eisner recalls saying. “He said, ‘Well, it’s a comedy about a character who has the head of a horse and the body of a man.’” Eisner, who used to get a kick out of Mister Ed back in the ’60s, loved it. “I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it,’” Eisner says. “That’s how long it took.”

The show that Bob-Waksberg wanted to make was constantly asking, “What does this all mean?” The full premise wasn’t all that complicated: “BoJack the Depressed Talking Horse.” In fact, that’s exactly how he described it in an email to a friend in Brooklyn, cartoonist and illustrator Lisa Hanawalt. They both grew up in Palo Alto, California. “I knew who he was in middle school because he was in school plays and because he was loud and weird,” Hanawalt says. “Which is my favorite kind of person.” Bob-Waksberg wrote Hanawalt because he needed an artist to help bring BoJack to life. Luckily for him, Hanawalt had always loved horses. In early 2010, a few months before he reached out about his show idea, she’d made a comic about a horse person.

“I looked at his pitch, and I was like, ‘This looks really depressing. I don’t know about this. I’m into things that are less depressing,’” Hanawalt says. “And he was like, ‘OK, cool.’ But now I actually like the depressing aspects of it a lot. I take it back.”

With Hanawalt’s blessing, Bob-Waksberg downloaded a bunch of animal drawings from her website and showed them to Cohen and Bright. “I kind of put them in a little envelope, and I brought it with me and said, ‘This is the show I want to make, with these guys,’” he says. The execs loved the concept and asked for an outline. “I was frantically Googling, ‘What does an outline of a TV episode look like?’” Bob-Waksberg says. “I sent in this thing, and Steve was like, ‘This is not an outline, but sure, go write your draft now.’”

Bob-Waksberg eventually came back with something more fleshed out. “Everything that came in was so true to form,” Bright says.

“All of a sudden, we realized that Raphael was different from everybody else,” Eisner says. “Somebody like Raphael comes along once a decade, if that.”

That original script treatment included what became the pilot’s opening scene: Charlie Rose interviewing a drunk, defensive BoJack about his long-ago-canceled sitcom, Horsin’ Around. “For a lot of people, life is just one hard kick in the urethra,” BoJack says. “Sometimes when you get home from a long 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 30 minutes, everything’s gonna turn out OK. Because in real life … did I already say the thing about the urethra?”

Finding someone to personify a sad horse turned out to be fairly easy: Bob-Waksberg and Arnett had the same manager. “My manager said, ‘Hey, this guy we represent wrote this really cool thing for this animated series,’” Arnett says. “And it’s always a crapshoot. You never know what you’re going to get. I read it and it was like, ‘Wow.’” The actor, who has a uniquely gravelly voice, loved that the series sounded both grounded and ridiculous. “OK, so this guy is kind of a has-been, and he lives in this fucking cliché house in the Hollywood Hills with what’s left of his entourage, which is one moron,” Arnett says. “And then on top of it all, he’s not a guy, he’s a horse.’”

“The first thing I said to Will—I mean, I was nervous, I guess, to meet a star—was just like, ‘It’s great that you’re cast because you sound like a horse,’” Hanawalt says. “And he’s like, ‘Never heard that one before.’”

The one guy left in BoJack’s entourage was Todd Chavez, who ended up being less of a moron and more of a sweet and sneakily wise slacker with a million crazy ideas. Kind of like Jesse Pinkman if he’d never met Walter White. Coincidentally, Breaking Bad was almost over, and Aaron Paul was about to be available. “He got this really goofy, silly comedy script, and he did not know this would also go to a dark place,” Bob-Waksberg says. “And so I think he felt like, ‘Oh, this is a ray of sunshine. What a fun break from being in a pit, the slave of neo-Nazis making meth all day.’” Not long after he learned about BoJack, Paul committed to it. “I love that you can laugh and also really have an emotional experience in a single scene of that show,” he says.

The rest of the main BoJack characters were a mix of humans and animal people. Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris) is BoJack’s feline agent who struggles with work-life balance. Like most Labrador retrievers, actor Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins) is an outwardly cheerful people pleaser. And Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie) is BoJack’s Vietnamese American ghostwriter who deals with depression. (When we spoke, Bob-Waksberg complimented Brie’s performance but reiterated a point that he’s made in other interviews: “I think I was not fully cognizant when I cast her, the limitations I was putting on myself by casting a white actress to play a Vietnamese character. I wasn’t up to the responsibility of writing a Vietnamese character fully. And so part of that is it’s not just the casting, it’s the writing. It’s that I wasn’t thinking about all the dimensions of what this would mean. And I think that, combined with the casting of Alison, was a disservice to the character.”)

Yet even with all BoJack had going for it, networks weren’t interested. Bob-Waksberg felt like he was rowing a boat with one arm, just going in a circle. “No one’s going to buy this show,” he remembers thinking. “Maybe I’ve outgrown it.” Arnett and Paul, who’d also come on as executive producers, did their best to sell the project, but it seemed futile. “I was part of the pitching process, just kind of calling people that I had relationships with or had a past with and really pushing this thing to get across the line,” Paul says. “And everyone was passing on it.”

Everyone except one. In the early 2010s, Netflix was no longer just a DVD subscription service. It was gunning to become a real Hollywood studio. To make a big splash—with consumers and creators—it needed to take creative risks, particularly the kind that other networks had long been afraid to take. It had found early success with House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and a reboot of Arrested Development but still hadn’t green-lit an animated show. Cohen and Bright happened to know Blair Fetter, a new creative executive at the company. They asked him whether he’d take a look at an animation test put together by Mike Hollingsworth, who became the show’s supervising director.

“That five-minute test had me hooked,” Fetter says in an email.

“The questions he asked were ‘Is this going to have Will Arnett in it? Is it going to have Aaron Paul?’” Bright remembers. “I was like, ‘Yes. Yes.’ Those are the easy answers.” Then Fetter asked two more questions: “Does the creator have a vision?” and “Could we hear it?”

About a month later, Bob-Waksberg had a meeting with Netflix. During his presentation, which lasted more than an hour, he sketched out the entire first season of the show without a single note in front of him. The pitch was years in the making. “That long development process gave me the room to grow as a writer and figure out what kind of stories I wanted to tell in this world so that when the opportunity came,” Bob-Waksberg says, “I would be ready for it.”

“It felt exactly like the Netflix version of an animated series,” Fetter says. “We were all in.”

The first season of BoJack Horseman had to be made at a full gallop. After selling the show to Netflix, Bob-Waksberg and his team had about seven months to finish 12 episodes. “Which was wild,” he says. “We had some materials because we’d been developing it for so long, but it was still a mad dash to get that first season done.”

The process of learning how to create a digitally animated show on the fly was particularly difficult for Hanawalt, the production designer. “I was using watercolor on paper,” she says. “I didn’t know how to draw on the computer at all.” What she did already know how to do was create distinct characters. That helped give the show its unique look.

“What first drew us in was her attention to attire and wardrobe,” Cohen says. “Drawings of some of the characters that were these anthropomorphic animals but were wearing a tweed jacket with patches and a vest or a tie. And all these different looks that were exciting and different than the traditional animation characters that were wearing one outfit for 30 years.”

Hanawalt liked playing around with patterns, whether it was the designs on BoJack’s sweaters, the little fish on Princess Carolyn’s dress, or the red arrows on Diane’s jacket. “A lot of the details didn’t come from anywhere in particular,” she says. “It was just me wanting to make them look specific rather than generic.”

The anthropomorphic cast eventually could’ve filled Noah’s ark, giving the animators the opportunity to conjure up characters like Sextina Aquafina, a dolphin pop star; Amanda Hannity, the editor of Manatee Fair; and Cuddlywhiskers, a hamster and TV producer. Naturally, the show was full of animal references, animal jokes, and animal puns. Yellow lab Mr. Peanutbutter gets anxious when there’s a stranger in his yard. There’s a spear-nosed bartender/marlin at a ’50s diner named Brando who announces the delivery of three beers: “Stella!,” “Stella!,” and “Corona Light.” And Princess Carolyn has dinner with an albino rhino gyno.

And aside from The Simpsons, no animated series had better—or more numerous—sight gags. Some were broad, like Vincent Adultman, who’s really three kids stacked under a trench coat. Others were of the blink-or-you’ll-miss-it variety, like a party banner that says, “Happy Birthday Diane and use a pretty font.” There were also plenty of running jokes, like when Hollywood became “Hollywoo” in the show after BoJack drunkenly stole the “D” in the famous sign. The way Bob-Waksberg sees it, some of the series’ silliest bits popped because of what Arnett did with them. The showrunner recalls working on the scene where BoJack wakes up hungover and sees the missing “D” in his pool. “The line we wrote for him was ‘D-d-d-damn,’” Bob-Waksberg says. “And I remember being like, ‘OK, we’ll replace this later. This is not a joke,’” he says. “And then Will did it at the table read, and it was so funny and stupid. And so we thought, ‘OK, let’s not touch that.’”

Like Arnett, BoJack was a veteran sitcom actor with impeccable comic timing. But the character was also, frankly, despicable. Arnett realized that early in the show’s run. He points to a story line in the first season when BoJack is so afraid of losing his lackey Todd that he sabotages his rock opera. “BoJack is so fucking hateful about it,” Arnett says. “That for some reason always sticks out at me because Todd’s so sweet and kind and BoJack is just so unrelentingly BoJack in that moment.”

While voicing someone with so many ups and downs, Arnett admits that he couldn’t help but think of his own. “It made me think about my own mental health a little bit, for sure,” he says. “A lot of it felt like it’s a cautionary tale.”

Over the years, Arnett has spoken candidly about his own sobriety. “I’ve often thought about how prescient it was of Raphael to write this,” Arnett says. “And I went through my own struggles, which I talked about with Raphael. I was like, ‘God, it’s so odd to do this thing, to play this guy.’”

Still, Arnett is not BoJack. Despite what some misguided fans might think. Several years ago, the actor had a house built in Beverly Hills. It had a pool. “People were like, ‘I saw photos of Will Arnett’s house, it’s just like BoJack!’” Arnett says. “And I’m like, ‘Motherfucker, shut up.’ By the way, we need to take the internet apart.”

At midnight on August 22, 2014, Netflix released the entire first season of BoJack Horseman. “We all waited up and watched the first couple of episodes,” Bright says. The next morning, the producers started hearing that some viewers had seen all 12. That shocked them. After all, binge-watching TV was still a relatively new phenomenon. “That was something that we all looked at each other like, ‘This is unbelievable,’” Bright adds. “We just spent four and a half or five years working on this show. It premiered. And the next day, people were like, ‘I love the season.’” Most critics agreed: Writer Alan Sepinwall called the show “something that simultaneously functions as both lunatic farce and melancholy character study.” Four days after the first season dropped, Netflix announced that it was renewing the animated series for a second season.

These days, studios cancel promising shows with ruthless efficiency. But back then, streaming companies gave new series more time to build an audience. Even though BoJack didn’t have as many viewers as Game of Thrones, Netflix got behind it. That faith was a gift to its fans, a group that grew as time went on. “People that stayed with it and watched the show and got the show came to love it,” Bright says. “And it was really fun to see that happen.”

Viewers stuck with a series that stayed funny, but became less fun. BoJack’s depression worsens. He mistreats the people closest to him, repeatedly crosses the line with young women, and pathetically clings to the hope that he’ll once again become an A-lister. He reminded Eisner of an older American comedian he once ran into at a hotel in England. When Eisner asked what the comic was doing there, he replied that it was the only place he still got recognized. “BoJack was a big star,” Eisner says. “All he wants to do is be in the movie Secretariat, which he can’t get because he’s no longer a star. He spent all his money. He’s living a life of memories. He’s gotten himself involved with bad things, drugs and alcohol. He still has an agent. And it is a metaphor for anybody who’s had success and is now forgotten.”

To Bob-Waksberg, BoJack was, in some ways, like an exorcism: “I could get out some of my darker feelings into this show,” he says. But as sad as the series could be, he wasn’t trying to fetishize bleakness. He recalls a note a fan sent him after Season 4. “Which has one of our more hopeful endings,” Bob-Waksberg says. “But he had just seen Episode 11, and he emailed me saying, ‘I understand what your show is trying to tell me: Life is bitter and hopeless and it’s never going to get better, and I should stop hoping that it’ll get better or try to make it better. It’s just one slow slog down the drain.’” Bob-Waksberg responded by telling him to please watch Episode 12. “And then he did. He’s like, ‘I feel much better now.’ I was like, ‘OK, good.’”

As the series moved along, everyone in BoJack’s orbit tried to pull themselves up from the depths, even if it seemed impossible. As they grew, so did the show—both thematically and narratively. The audience got an inside look at every major character’s psyche, including Todd’s. Paul was touched when the kind goofball became TV’s most prominent asexual character. “I love that they decided to just tackle his identity and [him] trying to understand, wrap his own hands around like, ‘Wait, who am I truly? Who am I?’” Paul says. “And then obviously he realized, ‘Oh, I’m asexual.’ He didn’t even know that was a thing. And so many people come up to me, and I can tell right away that they want to talk to me about BoJack and specifically about asexual identity. And a lot of people said, ‘Look, I didn’t even know that was a thing. I just knew that I was different and I was just trying to find my place, and you really shined a light on something that I didn’t even really know existed, even though I’m living in that skin.’ It’s pretty amazing.”

Bob-Waksberg and the writers weren’t afraid to try new things. “At the beginning of just about every season, Raphael would pitch us a bold idea for one episode somewhere in the upcoming season,” says Fetter, now vice president of scripted series at Netflix. “He would pitch it off the cuff, and it always felt like it was going to be a terrible episode, leaving us skeptical. But inevitably, he would execute that big idea in such a mind-blowing way.”

One of those episodes barely had any dialogue. And it was set underwater. “I said, ‘Really?’” Eisner recalls. Bob-Waksberg told him yes. That idea became Season 3’s hypnotic “Fish out of Water.”

Then there was Season 5’s showstopper. Bob-Waksberg had always liked monologues. He wondered whether he could pull off an episode that was one long speech. “Just Will talking for 25 minutes,” he says. In the Emmy-nominated “Free Churro,” which Bob-Waksberg wrote, BoJack gives a wrenching eulogy at his abusive mother Beatrice’s funeral.

At most table reads, Arnett goofed around with Tompkins and Sedaris. This was different. He was the only actor there. “I thought, ‘I wonder how this is going to go. I guess we’re about to find out,’” he recalls. “And it was just very strange. And then reading it out loud, it worked. Which is just such a testament to how strong the material was.”

That day, the room was completely silent. “You could hear a pin drop,” Bob-Waksberg says. “It was just like everyone was on the edge of their seats. It was such this beautiful, intimate thing. It was incredible.”

In 2019, Netflix announced that the sixth season of BoJack Horseman would be its last. “It was such a dream job, and we were hoping to do it forever,” Paul says. “And so it was a bit of a hard pill to swallow when Netflix said, ‘Look, we love you, but we’re going to do one more season, and that’ll be it.’”

While making the final BoJack episodes, Bob-Waksberg didn’t allow himself to be wistful. He still had an ending to write. “It’s hard to internalize this idea of appreciating what you have while you have it,” he says. “There are moments where I enjoyed it, where I was having fun, where I thought, ‘This is cool. We’re doing something great. Look at me. I’m at TV fantasy camp.’ But I felt so much pressure all the time. Every season I thought, ‘This season has to top the last season, or people are going to hate us. People are going to hate me. This is the time where I let everybody down.’”

But that time never came. In the last scene of the series finale, BoJack and Diane have an intimate conversation on a roof. “Because we’d set up that imagery earlier, and that felt like something we kept coming back to,” Bob-Waksberg says. The question he had was “How do we get to that roof?”

Well, first BoJack hits bottom. After breaking into his old house, he nearly drowns in the pool. Then he’s sent to prison. He sees the sentence as comeuppance for a lifetime of shitty behavior. When he gets out of jail, he’s relieved to find that all the important people in his life have freed themselves from his grip. And BoJack, it seems, has freed himself from his own desperate need for validation. “I liked the idea of this final line, which Diane says, ‘It’s a nice night.’ And BoJack says, ‘Yeah, this is nice,’” Bob-Waksberg says. “Because it felt like so much of BoJack the character is him regurgitating the past or having anxiety about the future. And one of his difficulties is just being present in the moment. And so in a small way, giving him that, right at the end of the series, felt pathetic and rewarding and appropriate.”

“I think Raphael is right,” Arnett says. “BoJack spent so much time and the show spent so much time looking back at what made him so flawed and so worried about how he was going to be perceived and how he could manipulate people in situations. I think at the end of the day, all of that was sort of futile.” Arnett knew that BoJack was never going to be redeemed. “He wasn’t given the tools to mature and grow up, and we sort of see why. So how could we expect him to be this great guy?” he says. “I always thought it was kind of a miracle that he ended up being a functioning person at all.”

If there’s one thing that Arnett took from playing BoJack, it’s this: “Be honest with yourself about where you’re at. That’s what it taught me. I don’t always get it right, but I think I’m getting better at it.”

As the discussion of mental health issues has become less stigmatized in America in the 10 years since the show premiered, dozens of TV series and movies have depicted people dealing with past trauma and depression. But few, if any, have resonated quite like BoJack Horseman. “That’s one of the best shows that I’ve been in any way involved with in, I don’t know, 50 years,” says Eisner, who had a hand in Happy Days, Cheers, and Family Ties.

There’s a reason why Netflix’s Hollywood office has a big conference room named after the show. “I do think that BoJack Horseman showcased our ability to push boundaries in different mediums and certainly jump-started more animation and comedy in general,” Fetter says. “It’s probably the series most writers tell me they love all these years later.”

In the middle of working on BoJack, Hanawalt bought her first horse. “I found her on Facebook,” she says. “It was an impulsive purchase.” She also got her own anthropomorphic, animal-centric show, Tuca & Bertie, which ran for three seasons between Netflix and Adult Swim. Hanawalt hopes that there’s still a place for the kind of series like hers, the kind of series that BoJack helped usher in. “I want there to be room for more experimentation and a little weirder stuff,” she says. “I like that. Keep it weird.”

Right now, Bob-Waksberg is working on his next project. This time, he plans to put a little less pressure on himself this time around. He’s come a long way in the past five years.

Before the last half season of BoJack Horseman was released, there was a premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Bob-Waksberg took the stage to start the screening, with a note written down to himself at the top of his speech. Take a breath and take in this moment.

“Because I felt like I hadn’t done that for the entire run of the show,” Bob-Waksberg says. “That’s something that I’ve tried to take with me since then, to not get so—like BoJack—hung up on the future or the past that I forget to be in the present.”