[ed. Note: spoiler alert]
BoJack Horseman’s Brilliant Crack-Up
It’s hard to think of a show currently on air that could make me want to watch a single character speak in one long, despairing stream for nearly a whole episode. Prolonged expressions of angst can sink live-action drama, which thrives on eventfulness and conflict. But BoJack Horseman—a cartoon sitcom whose title character is a melancholic, middle-aged stallion—inhabits a genre of its own, somewhere between slapstick and theater of the absurd. Midway through the show’s new season, BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) wears a charcoal suit and stands at a pulpit next to a coffin. His mother has died. For over 20 full minutes, with no interruption, he delivers a brilliant, pained, rambling eulogy.
Written by the show’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with brilliant art direction by Lisa Hanawalt, the monologue careens between pathos and black humor, delusion and acceptance—and is totally transfixing. BoJack doesn’t miss his mother so much as he despises her; he is angry that she’s left him without a sense of closure. He begins his story by saying that when he went to a fast-food place and said that his mother had died, the person behind the counter gave him a free churro. Later, he ties this anecdote up in a joke: “My mother died, and all I got was this free churro.” Then he adds, “That small act of kindness showed more compassion than my mother gave me her entire goddamn life.” His voice starts to break, as he finally confronts a lifetime of abuse from his mother. It is an aria of abjection and resentment. I’m still thinking about it, days later.
If this seems like heavy stuff for a cartoon, BoJack has earned it. Over five seasons, Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt crafted a truly goofy world (there’s a spider who works as a playwright, multitasking with eight limbs, and an ingenue deer who has literal doe-eyes) that allows them to slip in and out of surreal, sometimes dark subject matter. In one episode, a pop star named Sextina Aquafina (a leotard-wearing dolphin) has a cynical hit song about abortion; in another, BoJack is present when one of his young mentees overdoses on heroin in a planetarium. In true Darwinian fashion, BoJack Horseman has evolved from an easy joke about a horse to one of the most complex and empathetic shows on television. (...)
BoJack has become, more than anything, a show about how hurt people hurt people. It is about generational trauma, and how abuse trickles down until someone works out how to stop the train. In his eulogy, BoJack muses on the nature of sitcoms as a metaphor for life. He says that in television writing, you can never have a happy ending, because then the show would be over: “There is always more show, I guess, until there isn’t.” His mother’s story may be over, but he is still living with the trauma of her life, still acting out its major scenes. He is caught in a loop—a fact underscored by the eerie sense that BoJack may not be delivering this speech to anyone at all, but may be standing in an empty room, or perhaps inventing the macabre setting in his mind. He often cues an off-screen drummer to play a snare riff after his jokes, which makes the episode feel like a dream sequence, a kind of nonsensical vaudeville act. (...)
There is a sticky cohesion to this episode, which is the apex of the season—it both stands alone and works as a mortar for the other characters’ stories (Diane travels to Vietnam in the numb wake of her divorce, Princess Caroline is desperately trying to adopt a baby, the feckless Todd rockets to the top of the corporate ladder in a position he can neither handle nor control). This is what BoJack Horseman has been building up to for several seasons—it is a cathartic release and a cruel joke. The last words BoJack’s mother ever said to him were “I see you” from her hospital bed. It was “not a statement of judgment or disappointment,” he says, “just acceptance and the simple recognition of another person in a room. Hello there, you are a person, and I see you. Let me tell you, it is a weird thing to feel at 54 years old that for the first time in your life, your mother sees you.”
By the end of his speech, BoJack realizes that Beatrice was in the intensive care unit, and she was probably just reading the words “ICU” from a wall. He steels himself against this knowledge and says that he is relieved to finally know that, like all other creatures slithering and trotting and flapping their way through Hollywoo, he is truly on his own. Then, he looks up, and we finally see his audience: a confused-looking room full of reptiles, flicking their tongues. He is in the wrong funeral parlor. The ordeal sends him on a long bender, a dizzying descent toward tragedy. But for a moment, the show conveys all the ache of another person’s loss, whether he is man or beast.
by Rachel Syme, TNR | Read more:
Image: Netflix
Better Call Saul Ends a Bleak, Beautiful Season
by Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Nicole Wilder/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
[ed. I haven't seen BCS's fourth season yet and will have to wait until it's released in its entirety on Netflix. However, I did finally watch Bojack deliver his eulogy in the "Free Churro" episode last night, and it's both brilliant and riveting. Both shows are incredibly nuanced and intelligent. If you haven't seen one or the other, do yourself a favor and check them out. TV doesn't get much better than this.]
BoJack Horseman’s Brilliant Crack-Up
Written by the show’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with brilliant art direction by Lisa Hanawalt, the monologue careens between pathos and black humor, delusion and acceptance—and is totally transfixing. BoJack doesn’t miss his mother so much as he despises her; he is angry that she’s left him without a sense of closure. He begins his story by saying that when he went to a fast-food place and said that his mother had died, the person behind the counter gave him a free churro. Later, he ties this anecdote up in a joke: “My mother died, and all I got was this free churro.” Then he adds, “That small act of kindness showed more compassion than my mother gave me her entire goddamn life.” His voice starts to break, as he finally confronts a lifetime of abuse from his mother. It is an aria of abjection and resentment. I’m still thinking about it, days later.If this seems like heavy stuff for a cartoon, BoJack has earned it. Over five seasons, Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt crafted a truly goofy world (there’s a spider who works as a playwright, multitasking with eight limbs, and an ingenue deer who has literal doe-eyes) that allows them to slip in and out of surreal, sometimes dark subject matter. In one episode, a pop star named Sextina Aquafina (a leotard-wearing dolphin) has a cynical hit song about abortion; in another, BoJack is present when one of his young mentees overdoses on heroin in a planetarium. In true Darwinian fashion, BoJack Horseman has evolved from an easy joke about a horse to one of the most complex and empathetic shows on television. (...)
BoJack has become, more than anything, a show about how hurt people hurt people. It is about generational trauma, and how abuse trickles down until someone works out how to stop the train. In his eulogy, BoJack muses on the nature of sitcoms as a metaphor for life. He says that in television writing, you can never have a happy ending, because then the show would be over: “There is always more show, I guess, until there isn’t.” His mother’s story may be over, but he is still living with the trauma of her life, still acting out its major scenes. He is caught in a loop—a fact underscored by the eerie sense that BoJack may not be delivering this speech to anyone at all, but may be standing in an empty room, or perhaps inventing the macabre setting in his mind. He often cues an off-screen drummer to play a snare riff after his jokes, which makes the episode feel like a dream sequence, a kind of nonsensical vaudeville act. (...)
There is a sticky cohesion to this episode, which is the apex of the season—it both stands alone and works as a mortar for the other characters’ stories (Diane travels to Vietnam in the numb wake of her divorce, Princess Caroline is desperately trying to adopt a baby, the feckless Todd rockets to the top of the corporate ladder in a position he can neither handle nor control). This is what BoJack Horseman has been building up to for several seasons—it is a cathartic release and a cruel joke. The last words BoJack’s mother ever said to him were “I see you” from her hospital bed. It was “not a statement of judgment or disappointment,” he says, “just acceptance and the simple recognition of another person in a room. Hello there, you are a person, and I see you. Let me tell you, it is a weird thing to feel at 54 years old that for the first time in your life, your mother sees you.”
By the end of his speech, BoJack realizes that Beatrice was in the intensive care unit, and she was probably just reading the words “ICU” from a wall. He steels himself against this knowledge and says that he is relieved to finally know that, like all other creatures slithering and trotting and flapping their way through Hollywoo, he is truly on his own. Then, he looks up, and we finally see his audience: a confused-looking room full of reptiles, flicking their tongues. He is in the wrong funeral parlor. The ordeal sends him on a long bender, a dizzying descent toward tragedy. But for a moment, the show conveys all the ache of another person’s loss, whether he is man or beast.
by Rachel Syme, TNR | Read more:
Image: Netflix
***
Better Call Saul Ends a Bleak, Beautiful Season
“S’all good, man.”
That is the parting shot of Better Call Saul’s fourth season, as Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) is led away from his partner Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) to sign papers that will return him to the field. “Good” is a concept that Jimmy’s gotten further away from during the run of the show, and there is nothing good about the way he achieves his victory here. Kim’s reaction to his revelation of insincerity — the same quality that caused a different tribunal to reject him the previous week — is wrenching in part because it stands in for viewers who like Jimmy, and who want to continue to see redeemable qualities along with his amazing facility for con games and improvised bullshit. It’s hard to see Jimmy going the other way between now and the end of this show, whenever that turns out to be. The look on Kim’s face at the end is heartbreaking: deep disappointment shading into nausea at what an empty-hearted manipulator Jimmy has become. (...)
The other characters end the season in morally precarious places, too — Mike (Jonathan Banks) more than anybody, after executing the runaway German engineer Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock). This is the first killing we’ve seen Mike commit that was cold-blooded — housekeeping with a gun instead of a mop. He was on the gray scale already when we met him, but things are looking a lot darker now. Meanwhile, Mike’s boss, the canny individualist Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), is on the brink of being fully absorbed into the Salamanca empire — I’d rather not say how that story resolves in Breaking Bad, as increasing numbers of people tell me that they’re watching BCS despite never having seen a frame of the other series — and Salamanca captain Nacho Varga (Michael Mando) is facing what looks a purgatorial sentence, somewhat mirroring Jimmy’s season of doing without a law license. He’s forced to deal with a new Salamanca, Eduardo a.k.a. Lalo (Tony Dalton), not long after trying and failing to kill another one (Mark Margolis’s Don Hector, to whom Lalo presents the desk bell that will become his aural signature).
But for now, Kim is still the closest thing Better Call Saul has to a voice of conscience, her attraction to Jimmy an Achilles heel inseparable from her attraction to danger as well as her sentimental attachment to winning seemingly unwinnable cases. The switcheroo that she pulled with the architectural plans for Mesa Verde’s El Paso branch could also get her in trouble, thrilling as it was to team up with Jimmy again in what could’ve been a deleted scene from The Sting. Her hands are dirty for sure, but she hasn’t smeared herself from head to toe in muck like Jimmy, or knowingly slithered deeper into the swamp like Mike. But in one respect, Kim’s position might be the saddest of all, because she gets to watch somebody she cares about and believes in turn colder and more manipulative over time, with no reasonable hope of pulling him back in the other direction.
It’s a gut punch even if you knew that Jimmy McGill had to become Saul, that his corruption would be a subtle process, and that — as on Breaking Bad, the series that created Jimmy/Saul, as well as Mike, Gus, and other BCS regulars — it wouldn’t be the sort you could analyze like a soil sample and then display with each layer named and tagged. Saul was always present in Jimmy, just as Heisenberg was always present in Walter White. To the credit of both shows, the writing, directing, and acting gave you a lot of information to process but tended to stop short of telling you exactly how you were supposed to read it.
None of that numbs the bruising sadness of Better Call Saul’s fourth season finale, the capper to the best and bleakest season of this excellent comedy-drama. This batch of episodes embraced the bifurcated nature of the show, which always spent roughly half of its time in the high-dollar world of white-collar crime and the other half among physically violent drug dealers and street criminals — embraced it so fully, in fact, that it often felt as if we were watching two shows in one, starring three central protagonists (Jimmy, Mike, and Kim) and many major supporting players, all sliding on the moral spectrum between pure and corrupt, each landing farther along by the end.
Series creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan and their peerless writing staff (which includes Gennifer Hutchison, Alison Tatlock, Ann Cherkis, Thomas Schnauz, Heather Marion, and Gordon Smith) have created a series that’s nearly immaculate in its construction, with every story beat taking the form of a clearly laid-out montage, sequence, or theater-style scene — one that usually unfolds at a much slower pace than TV’s usual, leaving room for pregnant pauses, entrances and exits, and moments where we get to just stare at a character’s face as they contemplate what they’re about to do, what they’ve just done, or what’s about to happen to them.
That is the parting shot of Better Call Saul’s fourth season, as Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) is led away from his partner Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) to sign papers that will return him to the field. “Good” is a concept that Jimmy’s gotten further away from during the run of the show, and there is nothing good about the way he achieves his victory here. Kim’s reaction to his revelation of insincerity — the same quality that caused a different tribunal to reject him the previous week — is wrenching in part because it stands in for viewers who like Jimmy, and who want to continue to see redeemable qualities along with his amazing facility for con games and improvised bullshit. It’s hard to see Jimmy going the other way between now and the end of this show, whenever that turns out to be. The look on Kim’s face at the end is heartbreaking: deep disappointment shading into nausea at what an empty-hearted manipulator Jimmy has become. (...)
The other characters end the season in morally precarious places, too — Mike (Jonathan Banks) more than anybody, after executing the runaway German engineer Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock). This is the first killing we’ve seen Mike commit that was cold-blooded — housekeeping with a gun instead of a mop. He was on the gray scale already when we met him, but things are looking a lot darker now. Meanwhile, Mike’s boss, the canny individualist Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), is on the brink of being fully absorbed into the Salamanca empire — I’d rather not say how that story resolves in Breaking Bad, as increasing numbers of people tell me that they’re watching BCS despite never having seen a frame of the other series — and Salamanca captain Nacho Varga (Michael Mando) is facing what looks a purgatorial sentence, somewhat mirroring Jimmy’s season of doing without a law license. He’s forced to deal with a new Salamanca, Eduardo a.k.a. Lalo (Tony Dalton), not long after trying and failing to kill another one (Mark Margolis’s Don Hector, to whom Lalo presents the desk bell that will become his aural signature).
But for now, Kim is still the closest thing Better Call Saul has to a voice of conscience, her attraction to Jimmy an Achilles heel inseparable from her attraction to danger as well as her sentimental attachment to winning seemingly unwinnable cases. The switcheroo that she pulled with the architectural plans for Mesa Verde’s El Paso branch could also get her in trouble, thrilling as it was to team up with Jimmy again in what could’ve been a deleted scene from The Sting. Her hands are dirty for sure, but she hasn’t smeared herself from head to toe in muck like Jimmy, or knowingly slithered deeper into the swamp like Mike. But in one respect, Kim’s position might be the saddest of all, because she gets to watch somebody she cares about and believes in turn colder and more manipulative over time, with no reasonable hope of pulling him back in the other direction.It’s a gut punch even if you knew that Jimmy McGill had to become Saul, that his corruption would be a subtle process, and that — as on Breaking Bad, the series that created Jimmy/Saul, as well as Mike, Gus, and other BCS regulars — it wouldn’t be the sort you could analyze like a soil sample and then display with each layer named and tagged. Saul was always present in Jimmy, just as Heisenberg was always present in Walter White. To the credit of both shows, the writing, directing, and acting gave you a lot of information to process but tended to stop short of telling you exactly how you were supposed to read it.
None of that numbs the bruising sadness of Better Call Saul’s fourth season finale, the capper to the best and bleakest season of this excellent comedy-drama. This batch of episodes embraced the bifurcated nature of the show, which always spent roughly half of its time in the high-dollar world of white-collar crime and the other half among physically violent drug dealers and street criminals — embraced it so fully, in fact, that it often felt as if we were watching two shows in one, starring three central protagonists (Jimmy, Mike, and Kim) and many major supporting players, all sliding on the moral spectrum between pure and corrupt, each landing farther along by the end.
Series creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan and their peerless writing staff (which includes Gennifer Hutchison, Alison Tatlock, Ann Cherkis, Thomas Schnauz, Heather Marion, and Gordon Smith) have created a series that’s nearly immaculate in its construction, with every story beat taking the form of a clearly laid-out montage, sequence, or theater-style scene — one that usually unfolds at a much slower pace than TV’s usual, leaving room for pregnant pauses, entrances and exits, and moments where we get to just stare at a character’s face as they contemplate what they’re about to do, what they’ve just done, or what’s about to happen to them.
by Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Nicole Wilder/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
[ed. I haven't seen BCS's fourth season yet and will have to wait until it's released in its entirety on Netflix. However, I did finally watch Bojack deliver his eulogy in the "Free Churro" episode last night, and it's both brilliant and riveting. Both shows are incredibly nuanced and intelligent. If you haven't seen one or the other, do yourself a favor and check them out. TV doesn't get much better than this.]
