BoJack Horseman

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

BoJack Horseman lives in a Los Angeles where an animal’s species can provide a visual joke without making their problems any less ordinary. He was a beloved sitcom actor in the nineties; years later, recognition still follows him, but it has not given him a satisfying next chapter. A memoir is supposed to help him regain the spotlight, and hiring a ghostwriter makes his self-image someone else’s professional problem. Raphael Bob-Waksberg created the series, with Will Arnett voicing BoJack and a principal cast including Amy Sedaris, Alison Brie, Aaron Paul and Paul F. Tompkins. Its entertainment world runs on agents, publicity and opportunities to reinvent a reputation. The difficulty is that a rewritten public story cannot change what he has already done, or guarantee that he will behave differently the next time someone trusts him.

That conflict becomes explicit when Diane’s book makes BoJack feel exposed rather than celebrated. In “Downer Ending,” he promises to write a better version himself, but his attempt with Todd and Sarah Lynn deteriorates into drug-taking and nonsense. Todd’s response to the loss of his rock opera is especially uncomfortable: he expected so little from BoJack that the betrayal has not surprised him. BoJack’s hallucinations then offer a different life, one in which he marries his old acquaintance Charlotte and has a daughter. It is an imagined escape from the choices he has actually made. When he wakes, he finds Diane at a ghostwriter convention and admits that her book is excellent. He asks her to confirm that he is a good person, but she does not answer. The praise he wanted for his memoir has become a demand that another person settle his moral worth.

His real visit to Charlotte in New Mexico destroys the fantasy of simply stepping into another life. She already has a husband and children, yet he stays for two months, sleeping on a yacht in their driveway and abandoning his film responsibilities. When he accompanies her seventeen-year-old daughter Penny to prom, he supplies alcohol to the teenagers. After her friend Maddy passes out, he leaves Maddy and Pete at a hospital and pressures Pete to conceal his involvement. Back at the house, Charlotte rejects his attempt to turn their friendship into romance. She later finds him with Penny in a compromising situation aboard the boat and orders him to leave permanently. His departure is a consequence of his own conduct. The family he treated as a possible refuge has boundaries, and his wish to escape dissatisfaction gives him no right to damage its members.

The same habit of pulling other people into his distress becomes fatal around Sarah Lynn. She has been sober for nine months when BoJack invites her to drink, and the relapse becomes a long series of blackouts, attempted apologies and further harm. Their visit to Penny in Ohio frightens her rather than making amends. They eventually take heroin, and Sarah Lynn learns she has won an Oscar for a song without feeling happier about who she has become. At Griffith Observatory, BoJack tries to reduce the importance of their failures by talking about how small people are in the universe. Beside him, Sarah Lynn succumbs to an overdose. The contrast is severe: he is using a grand perspective to make their mistakes feel bearable while something irreversible happens to the person sharing that moment. Her professional success cannot undo what the binge has done.

A later retreat to the Sugarman family’s Michigan lake house connects BoJack’s flight from the present with pain that predates him. Flashbacks show his grandmother Honey unraveling after her son Crackerjack dies in the Second World War. Her husband Joseph has her lobotomized, and she tells young Beatrice not to love anyone as much as she loved her son. In the present, BoJack repairs the neglected house with Eddie, a dragonfly who refuses to fly. BoJack tricks him into doing it, only to learn that Eddie’s wife died in a flying accident. Eddie nearly drowns them both in anger. The restoration ends with BoJack arranging to tear the house down and leave. The place has brought together two generations of family loss and a neighbor’s grief, but rebuilding its walls has not given him the knowledge or care to handle them.

Near the end, the series turns BoJack’s fear of death into a dinner with people who have already died. “The View from Halfway Down” gathers Sarah Lynn, Herb and his mother among the guests, while his father appears in the form of Secretariat. A strange black liquid intrudes, and an after-dinner show sends the guests through a door from which they do not return. BoJack gradually realizes that this is happening while his body floats face-down in a swimming pool. His remembered call to Diane was a voicemail, and the reassuring conversation he now has with her cannot bring help from outside the dream. As the liquid closes in, the room offers no final reconciliation that can rescue him. The familiar people are present as parts of his mind, forcing him to confront what he can no longer arrange through an apology or a new performance.

BoJack survives, but the finale does not hand him everyone’s former place in his life. Imprisoned for breaking into his old house, he receives leave to attend Princess Carolyn’s wedding. Todd helps him step away from the crowded celebration, while Princess Carolyn is happy with her marriage and offers to recommend other representation instead of taking him on again herself. Diane tells him she is married to Guy and living in Houston. She also explains the distress caused by his final voicemail and indicates that their connection will not remain permanent. They share a quiet moment on the roof, with that limit still present. The ending leaves room for continued living without requiring the people he hurt to restore their previous roles. Survival gives BoJack another day; it does not decide what anyone else owes him.