Saddest TV show is a surprise

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This article was published 16/09/2017 (3285 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You might think the saddest TV show around right now is some big, serious prestige drama about a burnt-out detective or a morally slippery lawyer or a wine-swilling suburban mother.

Nope, the saddest show is actually a colourful cartoon about a former sitcom star who’s half-man and half-horse.

It’s not just that BoJack Horseman (currently streaming on Netflix, with the recent release of Season 4) somehow manages to evoke the layered, lingering, complex kinds of pain we generally associate with three-hour European arthouse films.

Even more surprising is that this puddle-of-tears series — which so far has examined issues of abortion, addiction, miscarriage, depression, death and family dysfunction — is not just super-sad but also super-popular, even with the kids.

So how does BoJack creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg get us all to binge-watch such an emotionally harrowing, existentially fraught show? There are a few things going on.

CARTOON SADNESS: The self-loathing, self-destructive BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) lives in Hollywoo (the letter “D” having disappeared in a wacky Season 1 subplot). The town is populated by an animated mix of humanoid animals, human-humans and animal-animals.

The elastic possibilities of animation introduce us to penguin publishers and meerkat accountants and shellfish taking “shellfies” on their phones, but the whole set-up is never explained and the rules for animal-human behaviour remain adorably arbitrary.

Basically, the quirky, unexpected animation serves as a visible sign that this is not our everyday world. And paradoxically, that’s why the show is so killingly effective in examining that everyday world, in all its cruelty and folly and deep, deep sadness.

The importance of medium is demonstrated by Flaked, another Netflix show in which Arnett makes a live-action foray into a similar Los Angeles landscape of odious self-absorption. Without the distancing effects of animation, the whole thing is just too, well, odiously self-absorbed.

FUNNY SADNESS: BoJack Horseman is the kind of series that warrants repeat viewings just to catch the titles of books on characters’ shelves or the chyrons running underneath the blowhard whale newscaster on MSNBSea.

There are subplots about Vincent Adultman (actually three little boys stacked up under a trenchcoat), about reclusive — and dead — novelist J.D. Salinger as a game-show host, about a failed business venture involving dentist-clowns (and clown-dentists!).

And while some of the comedy involves lacerating wit and savage satire, there’s also plenty of simple throwaway silliness (“Honeydew is like the Jared Leto of fruit!”) to shore up against that ocean of tears.

EXPERIMENTAL SADNESS: Last season saw a completely silent episode that took place underwater. This season’s most avant-garde episode — and not coincidentally, one of its most heart-twisting — is from the point of view of a character living with dementia.

Beatrice Horseman, BoJack’s bitter and abusive mother, experiences the world as a disorienting kaleidoscope of the past and present, as faces blur, recognition strobes in and out, and apprehensions shift with dizzying suddenness.

Another Season 4 episode, Stupid Piece of Shit, uses jaggedy line animation and the constant, intrusive repetition of negative self-talk to suggest what it’s like to be inside BoJack’s head. (Spoiler alert: It’s awful, which is why this brutal and difficult depiction of depressive thinking feels so necessary.)

SNEAKY SADNESS: The series has addressed white privilege through the introduction of a hilariously patrician mouse family and explored the toxic effects of the celebrity-industrial complex with Sextina Aquafina, a “14-year-old dubstep wunderkind” dolphin.

This season also sees a weirdly cheerful take on the current state of American politics — which is about as sad as it gets — when Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins), a very friendly but not particularly bright Labrador Retriever, decides to run for governor of California on a whim. (“I don’t even know what a governor does!” he announces happily.) Watching this cute-animal slant on the democratic process, you’ll laugh until you cry. (Or vice versa.)

SADNESS DIVERSITY: BoJack is a self-pitying, self-sabotaging, alcoholic, pill-popping mess who regularly wrecks the lives of those around him.

And while the damaged, destructive middle-aged male in the throes of crisis can be a tired TV trope, the series gets around this potential problem by allowing for some equal-opportunity sadness.

This season, especially, has been exploring the sadness of the show’s other characters, including Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), a 40-something cat whose “work/life balance” is taking a big hit, and Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie), whose writing career has stalled while her marriage to Mr. Peanutbutter takes on a kind of bleak, Bergmanesque melancholy.

Rather than fetishizing BoJack’s solitary sorrow, the show looks at how webs of pain are inter-related. BoJack is sad because his mother was sad. And she was sad because her mother was sad. We learn a lot in Season 4 about the often contagious nature of sadness.

HOPEFUL SADNESS: BoJack Horseman goes to some very dark places, but it never falls into cheap nihilism. With weary, wise and, yes, sad humanity, the show explores BoJack’s jerkiness, not by excusing it but by seeking to understand it.

The last episode of Season 4 even holds out a little hope for our semi-equine antihero — partial and provisional, maybe, but still meaningful.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca