Bojack Horseman Season 5 Analysis, How The Show Questions Itself and Its Audience
In my opinion, the arc show Bojack Horseman really begins in Season 1, Episode 11, when
Bojack goes to a panel Diane is on, and asks her this.
These are the questions we continue to see explored throughout the series, questions
that will come front and center in the most important moments of season 5.
What makes one a good person?
What makes one a bad person?
And are these even categories we can use to understand our main character, the endlessly
flawed, selfish, and unlikeable Bojack Horseman?
Diane, sadly enough, isn’t able to muster a response until the end of the next episode
in the final moments of the first season.
Diane’s argument here is a convincing one—that people aren’t defined by some innate qualities
but rather by their actions, by the things they do.
And while the show has flirted with these themes since season 1, it’s in season 5
that we finally confront them head on.
In the season’s key storyline, we get an interest meta narrative.
Bojack stars in a show called Philbert, whose main character shares a number of similarities
with himself.
The running joke throughout the season, which becomes less and less funny, is that Bojack
is Philbert.
And with that the writers can use the show Philbert to comment on their own series.
In episode 4, Diane is hired on as a writing consultant for Philbert, but when it achieves
the success many writers would dream of, she questions whether or not she’s actually
positively affected the culture.
Before the premiere, Bojack introduces episode 1 with a dark reflection on his relationship
to the show.
And after an overwhelmingly positive reception from the audience, Diane reflects on show’s
message, and with this thin veil, she actually reflects on the show we’re watching, Bojack
Horseman.
Both Philbert and the show Bojack Horseman feature complex characters who are ultimately
just shitty, awful people.
In a sobering moment for both the show’s writers and for the audience, we all take
a moment to reflect on our relationship to Bojack Horseman.
In a world of prestige television filled complex anti-heroes who can be loved despite their
vile behavior and countless misdeeds, the writers of Bojack ask us to reflect on our
relationship to these types of characters.
Obviously Bojack isn’t a likeable protagonist, but has the purpose of the show to this point
been an attempt to garner sympathy for an irredeemably awful person.
And is that a flawed mission?
These are complex questions, certainly without simple answers, and in the next episode we
further confront these questions when Bojack loses mind and violently strangles his then-girlfriend
and co-star, Gina Cazador.
Suddenly, we as viewers are submerged in the show’s most claustrophobic episode to date.
If people are defined by their actions, if who we are is what we do, and Bojack Horseman
has now assaulted a woman on the set of a television show, where we go from here?
In a world where men in Hollywood are constantly given second chances, offered redemption,
the creators of Bojack Horseman make us question our relationship to him in one episode, and
in the next, turn his repulsiveness up about a hundred notches.
Rather than figuring out some way to garner sympathy, offering a redeeming moment to buffer
our relationship to him and his misdeeds, Bojack only spirals further.
At the end of the season 5, it doesn’t matter that Bojack is funny, or that, like Larry
David, he’s willing to say what everyone’s thinking, or that his childhood was awful,
or that he can’t seem to find happiness anywhere he looks.
It doesn’t matter who he is and what he’s like.
What matters is what he’s done and what he will do, and never is that felt more viscerally
than in the sobbing eyes of Gina as she sees Bojack losing his mind in a drug-fueled paranoia.
He needs to own up to his actions instead of trying to justify them or to find some
innate goodness underneath.
But at the end of season 5, Bojack attempts one last bit of mental gymnastics to avoid
truly changing his ways.
One of the staples of the series so far is Bojack’s ability to resign himself to self-loathing
and misery.
In a complete 180 turn from his original goal to convince Diane that, deep down, he’s
good, he now wants to accept that, deep down, he’s just an inherently bad person.
By crystalizing the idea that he’s a piece of shit, that his awfulness is somehow innate
and unchangeable, he manages to justify his cycles of abuse.
If he’s just a bad person, then these situations are simply inevitable.
It’s the same as resigning oneself to unhappiness.
Unhappy people must wake up unhappy.
Bad people must do bad things.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the last few moments of the season, Bojack asks Diane to write an exposé on his past,
to hold him accountable for his actions, to tell the world he’s simply a bad person.
But Diane refuses, returning to one of the show’s central themes.
In Diane’s opinion, Bojack’s desire to be seen as a “bad person” is just another
way to refuse to own up to his day-to-day actions.
Instead of improving his behavior, working on himself as a person, he wants to cement
the reality that, deep down, he’s just a bad person.
It’s an overly simplistic and entirely unproductive way to think of oneself.
What Diane wants, and practically forces him to do, is for him to admit that in reality,
each and every day he’s making these decisions, taking these actions.
There’s no good or bad underneath forcing him to do so.
And what he really needs to do is change.
Like many powerful men, Bojack Horseman isn’t yet being publicly held accountable for his
actions.
Maybe he will be, and maybe he won’t.
But in a surprisingly honest meta move, the show does at least hold itself and us as viewers
accountable for our relationship to him.
So with all that, we end season 5 not with a flawed protagonist we can still find ways
to love, nor with a complex anti-hero we can question and yet quietly respect, but instead
with the abusive indefensible male Hollywood celebrity that, in 2018, we deserve.
What’s fascinating to me though is Bojack’s response to Diane at the end of season 1
Obviously I understand why he thinks this is depressing in the moment, since he’s
done so many bad things, and wishes he could point to some goodness underneath.
But I don’t think this is depressing at all.
Once Bojack can finally wrap his head around the idea that people are their actions, that
there’s no such thing as an innately good or bad person, that we get to choose moment
to moment who we’re gonna be, what he should feel is free.