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I feel like it’s not inaccurate to just say the show starts as a comedy and morphs into a drama, because while I do think the beginning is mostly comedy, and the laughs and hijinks and so on stay pretty steady throughout, the tone of seasons 5-6 absolutely shift gears and as Bojack’s litany of assaults and weird sex crimes take more and more of the show’s energy it becomes less concerned with making us laugh than it does with making us feel an expanding pit in our stomachs.
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Oct 16, 2020 12:02
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It's a dramedy, it's a comma
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Oct 16, 2020 13:46
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Mr Ed must be a very ordinary sitcom in the BoJack universe.
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Oct 16, 2020 17:12
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pentyne posted:I don't think "GOAT" for animation is a valid category. You can't be comparing Batman TAS, ATLA, Daria, Bojack, Cowboy Bebop against each other and have it make any sense. Sure you can. And Bojack's better. Ugly In The Morning posted:One thing that really shocked me is that it was incredibly consistent season-to-season in terms of quality. A lot of the time you see a dip in quality around season 4 or 5 but it was incredibly well done throughout. A lot of people inexplicably thought season 5 was bad, with the only reason given that Bojack backsliding into bad behaviors and addiction had happened before in the show. Almost like addiction is cyclical or something. Lurdiak fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 17:47
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Lurdiak posted:Sure you can. I guess you could argue that Bojack almost shares a genre with Daria, though you probably shouldn't the rest of them? nah.
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Oct 16, 2020 17:51
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Lurdiak posted:A lot of people inexplicably thought season 5 was bad, with the only reason given that Bojack backsliding into bad behaviors and addiction had happened before in the show. Almost like addiction is cyclical or something. i thought the overall through-line of 5 was just okay but there were a lot of good individual episodes. diane's eat pray love ep and the halloween one are some of my favs of the whole series
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Oct 16, 2020 18:07
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Lurdiak posted:
i absolutely adore this thread, but man were some people telling on their own problems with their reaction to bojack itt. you could for sure tell some people were identifying with things they didn't care for in themselves.
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Oct 16, 2020 18:08
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This series is a lot like going to therapy, in that whatever you get out of it really depends on how you personally project on to it.
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Oct 16, 2020 18:21
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Bust Rodd posted:This series is a lot like going to therapy, in that whatever you get out of it really depends on how you personally project on to it. I do think Bojack should have died in that pool
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Oct 16, 2020 18:26
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Lurdiak posted:A lot of people inexplicably thought season 5 was bad, with the only reason given that Bojack backsliding into bad behaviors and addiction had happened before in the show. Almost like addiction is cyclical or something. Season 5 also had a pretty significant change in perspective. Raphael Bob-Waksberg has stated that season direction was really determined by two things. 1) His then talent agency signed Mel Gibson and was preparing a giant redemption/come back campaign for the racist, misogynistic anti-semite. Raphael Bob-Waksberg was understandably unhappy to learn that some percentage of his earnings was being used for that purpose. 2) People who worked on the show started hearing through the Hollywoo grapevine that Harvey Weinstein was a big fan of the show. This called into question everything that the writers were doing, if someone like Weinstein could watch the show and conclude that it was, at least on some level, supportive of abusive actions. You really got the sense the writers were looking at how redemption arcs were baked into the Hollywood system as a means perpetuating lovely abusive behavior. One complaint I remember hearing after the season released was the way the writers addressed this made the show too didactic. I don't agree with that criticism since the show has been unashamedly didactic since the beginning, but I do think their were some issues with the writing. For example, the season having some weird blind-spots with regard to some of the secondary characters selfish actions. The last two seasons tried to more directly look at the damage caused by Bojack from the perspective of his victims rather than Bojack himself, and I think season 6 was significantly more successful at it. I personally don't think season five is bad, but I don't think it quite nailed what it was going for.
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Oct 16, 2020 21:07
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Lurdiak posted:A lot of people inexplicably thought season 5 was bad, with the only reason given that Bojack backsliding into bad behaviors and addiction had happened before in the show. Almost like addiction is cyclical or something. Wasn't the general complaint about season 5 that PC was the one to push Bojack into drug abuse when he was genuinely helping her out for once? Because she was busy trying to adopt Untitled Princess Carolyn Project?
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Oct 16, 2020 21:09
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FronzelNeekburm posted:Wasn't the general complaint about season 5 that PC was the one to push Bojack into drug abuse when he was genuinely helping her out for once? Because she was busy trying to adopt Untitled Princess Carolyn Project? This seems like a completely nonsense pants-on-head interpretation of those events.
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Oct 16, 2020 21:13
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The friend who originally recommended this series to me did identify with Bojack and fell off the 5th series because he "felt that the series had gone from understanding him to hating him". I think it's honestly terrible to change the arc of a character because someone bad enjoyed the show, it cheapens the character a lot if they're now being used by the plotline as an example of a Bad Person rather than naturally developing. Season 6 did recover somewhat but I think 5 largely lost the character driven writing that made the previous series so compelling. The fact that it was written as a reaction to real-world events rather than as an extension of the existing characters is unsurprising to me.
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Oct 16, 2020 21:32
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Bust Rodd posted:This seems like a completely nonsense pants-on-head interpretation of those events. If you say so. I remember seeing posts like this on the subject. But I just skimmed through the 10-ish pages after that season dropped, and it seems like the actual big criticism people brought up repeatedly was Diane having her own serious problems to work through but insisting on trying to fix Bojack in vindictive ways, like forcing him to act out his confession about Penny on set, in front of the whole world. There were also some complaints about Bojack backsliding, but mostly in the context of, "The earlier seasons did this better." FronzelNeekburm fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 21:52
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If the writer’s response to hearing that news about Harvey Weinstein was to make what happened between Bojack and Gina that blatant and obvious that I think it was honestly for the benefit of the series
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Oct 16, 2020 21:56
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I didn’t view Season 5 as being out of line with Bojack’s character progression at all and it’s surprising to me that someone would think that. S5 also spent noticeably more time on Diane and PC’s arcs so it’s weird to hear anyone thinking they “lost” that focus.
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Oct 16, 2020 22:26
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I thought a lot of the complaints about what Diane did in season 5 had more to do with the fact that she was forcing BoJack to admit to something that could potentially harm his victims. It's one thing if that incident happened during a table read or similar off-air environment where those not in the know would continue just being like "that was loving weird, next scene" but this was captured and recorded for all the world to see. There are still issues with Diane's methods of extracting the truth from BoJack but if we want a recent example of a similarly lovely and harmful way to expose a secret we can look to the just concluded season 2 of The Boys, where [spoilers]Homelander outs Maeve on live television and all of the fallout surrounding that[/spoilers] was it season 5 or season 4 that had Diane go back to Vietnam?
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Oct 16, 2020 22:40
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My biggest beef with 5-6 was that Diane suffers no consequences or blowback from her extremely hosed up way of “owning” Bojack, IIRC
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Oct 16, 2020 22:55
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Season 5 didn't really click for me, and it's hard to point to any one thing that causes it, but I thought it was one of the show's weakest. Knowing that some writing decisions were explicitly made to tell Mel Gibson and Harvey Weinstein to gently caress off actually makes me like it better.
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Oct 16, 2020 23:05
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I remember thinking Season 5 was unsatisfying because it ultimately reiterated the same point that Season 3 did, which was that Bojack was the cause of his own problems. "It's you". Is it realistic for a troubled person to relapse back to old behaviours and have to relearn their epiphanies? Sure. Does that make for an engaging storyline in a serial television series? Eh...
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Oct 16, 2020 23:52
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In It For The Tank posted:Is it realistic for a troubled person to relapse back to old behaviours and have to relearn their epiphanies? Sure. Does that make for an engaging storyline in a serial television series? Eh... People have similar complaints for later seasons of Mad Men, which arguably does something similar. I'm ultimately glad they did it in both shows, because you're right: "relapse" feels so...un-cinematic? Antithetical to good storytelling? The sense that it's tedious and frustrating seeps into the portrayal, because it would also be tedious and frustrating for people in these character's lives. Part of the shame and self-loathing people feel IRL when they relapse comes from the sense of weakness or failure they feel, disappointing those in their orbit and eroding their support networks. It's profoundly unglamorous, which I'd argue is something new that happens in the second portrayal, making the entire thing feel a little different.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:09
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Since we're comparing them, I think Mad Men mostly fails to de-glamourise its problematic bad boy protagonist where Bojack succeeds. Don Draper's internal misery is almost always a grandiose pity party about this complex, troubled man who just has to be bad in sexy, appealing ways because his feelings are broken, and the narrative never really calls him out on this vs. Bojack's "poor me" tendencies being called out as the sad excuse they are. Plus, when Bojack acts out and does something lovely it's usually very obviously pathetic, as opposed to Don cheating on his wife with hot young women and then brooding in the car about it after he gets cinematically laid.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:34
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Bust Rodd posted:This series is a lot like going to therapy, in that whatever you get out of it really depends on how you personally project on to it. Definitely. I loved the hell out of season 5 thanks to some odd personal circumstances. I watched the whole Bojack series shortly after leaving a somewhat toxic roleplaying group. In our campaign there was a problematic storyline about a main NPC villain. He was a colonialist tyrannical ruler who did a lot of really bad things, including torturing my character at one point until she agreed to work for him. It was kind of upsetting but at the time, I rolled with it and reached an ok stopping point with that character. Then I made a new one to change things up and get some fresh air. But then the campaign proceeded to go on this whole redemption arc for the villain, sweeping what had happened before to my character (and others) under the rug like it was totally unimportant, and the campaign end where his faction achieved some victory was presented as a happy ending. That part was really upsetting. It hosed with my head for months. Not that bad poo poo happened to my character in the story, but how the real people I was playing with and thought I was friends with reacted to the portrayal of everything. How they seemed to agree with everything he did being just fine, because I couldn't properly raise my issues without the loudest players (who'd been supporting the villain) getting real defensive, like I was criticising them personally by criticising what their characters did. I haven't watched Breaking Bad but from reading a lot of comparisons in here, it sounds like a bit of a "fanboys flipping the gently caress out whenever Skyler dares to ever question Walt White" situation. I ended up feeling alienated from the whole group, thanks to how they seemed to enable things while still touting the group as a really progressive and supportive place. So for me, taking the time to focus on how Bojack is presented by the series felt really important and gratifying, and worth the relapse arc. It felt different enough from season 3 because it wasn't just about Bojack repeating the same cycles. It was also about wrestling with the whole idea of redeeming or glamourising a "badguy", and the lines between fictional stories and real-life attitudes when people identify with them. It helped me sort out a lot of really confusing feelings that were hard to talk about or explain to anyone, and gave me some examples to point to, and talk through my weird issues with a fellow Bojack fan. This show is really good, y'all.
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Oct 17, 2020 04:20
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DaWolfey posted:Mr Ed must be a very ordinary sitcom in the BoJack universe. flipper and lassie are cop shows i wonder if people think the musical cats is kinda racist in 2020 hollywoo. gently caress, cats must be a bare step above a strip club in the bojack world
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Oct 17, 2020 15:13
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The family waterpark just being a strip club for whales is a part of Bojack horseman that wounded me spiritually in a way I don’t have words for
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Oct 17, 2020 15:37
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luxury handset posted:flipper and lassie are cop shows Maybe the show already had way too many message episodes as it is but it’s kind of weird there was no in universe discussion about humans in “animal face” like Wallace Shawn and Paul Giamatti playing Bojack in horse heads.
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Oct 17, 2020 15:42
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steve irwin is a bounty hunter
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Oct 17, 2020 15:42
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AceOfFlames posted:Maybe the show already had way too many message episodes as it is but it’s kind of weird there was no in universe discussion about humans in “animal face” like Wallace Shawn and Paul Giamatti playing Bojack in horse heads. Didn’t they touch on this with a regular horse playing a zebra or like a zebra coloring in his stripes to play regular horse, I’m so sure they joke about that
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Oct 17, 2020 15:49
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Bust Rodd posted:Didn’t they touch on this with a regular horse playing a zebra or like a zebra coloring in his stripes to play regular horse, I’m so sure they joke about that They made Bojack a zebra for the therapist episode. They also made Todd a giant hand and Princess Carolyn a fog filled with yarn balls, so who knows if there was supposed to be symbolism in there or not.
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Oct 17, 2020 15:57
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I do remember a reference to a zebra in a whitewashing sense, maybe in S6?
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Oct 17, 2020 16:01
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Bust Rodd posted:This seems like a completely nonsense pants-on-head interpretation of those events. I don't think so. One of the intentions of the season was to look at how the industry is endless willing to "forgive" abusive actions, even while the actions are still going, so long as the person doing them remains a profitable commodity. This creates a treadmill of abuse->public scorn->forgiveness/redemption->work for the abuser before cycling back to abuse. The abuser is allowed to continue doing this so long as they continue to make money. Gina's song in the eleventh episode makes this point explicit, she sings about how a celebrities pain and tragedy are really just consumers products. All this makes it is really weird that the show doesn't have much to say about Princess Caroline's actions during the season. She constantly making selfish choices for sake of short term career gains, perpetuating cycles of abuse, and badly hurting people in the long term. Bojack was only working on Filbert to help out PC out to begin with. Once they started shooting, he also outright told her that he was deeply uncomfortable with the subject matter of the show and character of Filbert, and that he was afraid what being around it would do to his mental health. Bojack was completely correct about this and given their history, PC had every reason to know he was right. Rather than addressing this, she minimized his concerns and convinced him he was worrying about nothing. This is a very irresponsible reaction. When Bojack gets injured at work, her response is one of the nastiest things that someone who isn't Bojack does in the entire series. Specifically, she deliberately sends him to a doctor who will quote, "Inject him with enough pep to keep things together till the end of production." Princess Caroline, who knows better than anyone Bojack's history of substance abuse, sends him to shady doctor to get over-medicated on painkillers. She did this minimize how badly the accident would set back production. It is indefensible to dosed up a recovering drug addict with opioids for personal gain, period. In doing so she sent him into opioid induced psychosis which eventually leading to Bojack choking Gina. It would have been very apparent to everyone on the show including PC that Bojack was not in a sane state of mind, and production of Filbert should have been shut down immediately. This doesn't happen. You could argue that there are other people people with the power to shut down production such as Flip, so I shouldn't single out PC. However, the show never treats Flip as anything other than human garbage. PC on the other hand, is a main character and treated sympathetically by the show. Lastly, she also spearheads the coverup, when Bojack wants to come clean about what happened. Again, placing production on Filbert about everything else, including peoples safety. If the shooting wasn't shut down for unrelated reasons, then Bojack would have gone right back to set still violently unpredictable. It's not just that PC behaves monstrously in season five, though she absolutely does. It's that she behaves monstrously in a way emblematic of what the show is trying to criticize. Narrative, it is really weird that the show does not acknowledge this at all, let alone criticize on it. Bust Rodd posted:My biggest beef with 5-6 was that Diane suffers no consequences or blowback from her extremely hosed up way of "owning" Bojack, IIRC 100% agree. The fact that the show doesn't comment on either Diane or PC gently caress up actions is what I meant by the season having weird blind spots regarding it's the secondary character. I would put that as a big reason why fifth season is tied for first as the worst. This is despite fifth having some really great stuff as well. Gina explaining her reasons for publicly forgiving Bojack is genuinely chilling, and the clearest example of how Hollywoo perpetuates abuse. The aforementioned song is also fantastic. luxury handset posted:flipper and lassie are cop shows As oppose to the real world, were I would be considerably more ashamed to tell people that I saw the movie Cats then telling them I spent the last 2 hours at a strip club.
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Oct 17, 2020 16:47
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Bifauxnen posted:RPG story Thank you for sharing this. It illustrates some of the points I'm trying to make better than my wall of text.
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Oct 17, 2020 16:55
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For me, season 5 marks the end of a particular thematic approach of the series. One of the central ideas of the show, maybe even the central idea of the show, is that Bojack is both the victim of and perpetrator of abuse, both victim and victimizer. Intellectually, it's easy to understand that abuse is cyclical; that victims of abuse are likely to develop problems that cause them to hurt others, but what made the show special is that is explored just how uncomfortable and strange this overlap really is. Bojack is portrayed as alternately sympathetic and alienating, often in the same action. When seasons 1-4 Bojack does some wacky sitcom scheme, like spying on his girlfriends or sabotaging his friends' careers, he's textually acting wildly inappropriately, but structurally it's sympathetic because of how it relates to the TV comedy genre. The season 4 arc with Bojack's mom is the ultimate encapsulation of this. Hollyhock is shocked by how cruel Bojack is to her, but we the audience know that Bojack is only giving as good as he got, and then of course the GOAT episode Time's Arrow shows that Bojack's mom was only giving as good as she got. When at the end 1x3 Bojack and Diane discuss how Sarah Lynn's problems aren't caused by any one person (not even Bojack) but a whole slew of societal traumas, Bojack jokingly concludes that this line of thinking absolves everyone of any personal responsibility for their actions. It's pretty funny, but it's also disturbing. If no one's responsible for the harm they do to one another, how can any one person do anything to prevent or fix that harm? What could it possibly mean for Bojack to "get better" if the problems he faces and causes aren't personal at all? The traumas of the past are working through Bojack, and it's quite possible he's helpless to do anything about it. In season 5, it seems like the writers of the show are tired of working in this space of discomfort. In the middle of the #metoo movement, the ambiguity of the previous seasons is seen as no longer helpful and now a detriment. This might be a stretch, but to me there were some apparent drastic changes to how the season was planned. In 5x1, Flip sexually assaults Bojack, subjecting him to all kinds of sexual humiliation and at the climax of the episode physically attacking him to strip off his clothes to further humiliate him, but this isn't explored or brought up again in the rest of the series. Flip's characterization completely transforms in the very next episode. He's no longer a predator, but someone who's just in over his head who just needs a little help from Diane to write Filbert. The show's just not interested in showing Bojack as a victim anymore, so Flip can't be shown as a victimizer. Other instances where Bojack is wronged, like PC forcing him into the show fraudulently and doping him up with addictive painkillers rather than seeking real medical attention for him, are forgotten or ignored. Outside of Free Churro, far less attention is payed to how Bojack's present day actions mirror his traumatic childhood. Instead, the season pushes towards climactic moments where Bojack can reveal just how uniquely depraved he is. Now, I'm not saying whether this is good or bad. I personally prefer the more ambiguous approach of the early seasons, but it's not like the more direct take of seasons 5 or 6 is objectively worse. The only real objective criticism to make about this is that it's inconsistent, the result of a change in political mood.
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Oct 17, 2020 17:37
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I dont know posted:Thank you for sharing this. It illustrates some of the points I'm trying to make better than my wall of text. Yeah I agree that PC and Diane's poo poo in season 5 doesn't get called out by the show enough, since that's probably their lowest points. But I can understand the choice to not focus on them when the point they're trying to make is about the main character Bojack. Looking away to other characters' issues could be interpreted as a way of letting Bojack off the hook and making excuses for him. Or at worst, continuing the status quo where any time a cool male antihero starts to get questioned to bring up some accountability, people sidetrack into yelling about how some other thing a woman did makes her way more of a megabitch. The show does at least address PC and Diane's flaws lightly and less directly at other points, though. The same judgemental nature that led Diane to stepping way over the line to prove a point with Bojack is continuously shown as impotent for making any serious change in the world like she always dreamed of. She becomes much happier and kinder once she focuses on just keeping herself healthy and helping people however she realistically can, even if it's through a young adult series instead of doing something "serious". As for PC's complicity in the horrible Hollywoo system, there's often little subtle digs at how she continues to co-dependently enable Bojack. (Don't go back to that restaurant, Princess Carolyn, just keep driving away!) Or in the assistant strike, we can see she's become part of the same system that once tried to crush her aspirations too. Our sympathetic view of her is heavily boosted by class struggle, and seeing how she's had to fight so hard to claw her way up in that system. Most of all though, I'm just happy with how easy it is to actually bring these things up when discussing Bojack Horseman as a show, and how its fans are usually able to deeply analyse any character here and the issues surrounding them in good faith. The show itself definitely sets the tone for that.
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Oct 17, 2020 17:49
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pospysyl posted:This might be a stretch, but to me there were some apparent drastic changes to how the season was planned. In 5x1, Flip sexually assaults Bojack, subjecting him to all kinds of sexual humiliation and at the climax of the episode physically attacking him to strip off his clothes to further humiliate him, but this isn't explored or brought up again in the rest of the series. Flip's characterization completely transforms in the very next episode. He's no longer a predator, but someone who's just in over his head who just needs a little help from Diane to write Filbert. The show's just not interested in showing Bojack as a victim anymore, so Flip can't be shown as a victimizer. This might be true that they dialed him back for a while, but for what it's worth I always saw Flip being portrayed as a big part of the problem, and always intended to remain unsympathetic. Since a man praised for his edgy problematic prestige show, whose issues can also continually get excused and glossed over as part of his troubled artistic genius vision? That's definitely a character type that can get lumped in alongside Bojack for a takedown. The biggest example of course, is when Bojack strangles Gina, it gets explicitly mentioned that people believe he's strangling her for real, and Flip says to turn the camera back on.
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Oct 17, 2020 18:14
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The show occasionally throws in these reminders that all these people are thoroughly unpleasant. They can be kind to people in the circle and when it suits them but their livelihood is insanely horrible and they're all very good at it.
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Oct 17, 2020 19:48
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Mr. PB being the only person to intervene did a lot for me not hating him for the rest of the show. Just goes to show how willing people can be to forgive men for accomplishing literally the bare minimum of human decency.
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Oct 17, 2020 19:52
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I'm not sure where exactly Mister Peanutbutter fits into the grander narrative, but I don't think he's ever supposed to embody of the abusive nature of showbusiness as an abuser or a victim. He's closer to Todd in that he's mostly around for goofs and reflections on personal relationships.Big Taint posted:I do remember a reference to a zebra in a whitewashing sense, maybe in S6? This happened in season 3. PC was trying to book Bojack for a Young Adult Blockbuster movie (Flight of the Pegasus?), while competing with Vanessa Gecko and Rutabaga, who wanted to cast a zebra and said they could just paint over the stripes.
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Oct 17, 2020 22:32
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:I'm not sure where exactly Mister Peanutbutter fits into the grander narrative, but I don't think he's ever supposed to embody of the abusive nature of showbusiness as an abuser or a victim. He's closer to Todd in that he's mostly around for goofs and reflections on personal relationships. I just figured that Mr. PB was supposed to be what Bojack considered the ideal version of himself... at least, before his own dysfunctions started kicking in. Hell, that could even be symbolic of how even in a perfect world, Bojack still would have been some kind of hosed up (albeit still not as badly as he actually wound up being).
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Oct 18, 2020 01:15
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One thing I noticed in my rewatch is that I think they had the idea for the finale in the can for years. There isn't much of "the View from Halfway Down" that isn't set up by the end of season 2.
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Oct 18, 2020 01:30
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