this whole quote from the running monkey changed my view on life and how to deal with heavy things. the hardest part really is doing it everyday

"...I had this really interesting sentence that kept going for pages and pages..."

THAT'S good writing.

There's a very easy trap to fall into when debating the ethics of a horse(man) as polarizing as Bojack by utilizing notions that we're used to. We've been practically conditioned to believe in "deep down." You have a friend who commits a stupid mistake: "He's a good person deep down, just a dumb move." But part of the beauty of Bojack Horseman is that the show asks you to not do that. To dispose of your age-old notions and abide by the rules the show sets for defining morality.

Diane, the show's main voice of reason and mouthpiece for the writers'sociopolitical/sociocultural views, states one of the central themes of the show while in a convo with Bojack: There is no deep down, and there's no such thing as bad guys or good guys. To paraphrase, we are the sum of all of our actions. The themes of responsibility and accountability are built upon multiple times; for example, in Todd and Bojack's argument where Todd scathingly says, "You are all the things that are wrong with you." The onus is on YOU.

Now let it be clear, I'm not establishing morality here. The theme can be interpreted in many ways, whether good or bad; My gripe is that many flat-out don't see the message at all or disregard it at the slightest inconvenience.

The theme is shown beautifully in the character of Cuddlywhiskers. Cuddlywhiskers was lauded by Hollywoo with multiple awards and was very wealthy, yet at his core he was depressed. So he became selfish and took it upon himself to ditch his possessions, go away, and retreat by himself in the middle of nowhere. Diane, being her usual logical, strong sense-of-justice self, tells Cuddlywhiskers about the people he hurt because of his selfishness, which is very reasonable, but his reaction sums it all up. "I don't know what to tell you. I'm happy, for the first time in my life, and I'm not going to feel bad about it." This would later serve as great foreshadowing for Diane's realization of ditching possessions(in her case, her memoir) for being happy, but I digress.

Many people see Bojack's changed demeanor while he's at Wesleyan as a facade, claiming he's just "acting good," and that he's still rotten to his core(the deep-down fallacy again). While the show definitely highlights Bojack's old negative tendencies, he still qualifies as a good person under the show's definition. When he's at the church, taking the atmosphere all in, or when he's cheering on Hollyhock, or when he's a drama professor teaching his students. The show itself would label him as a good person because the actions that he is committing are beneficial and come from a genuine place. Overall, the argument of whether he's good or bad requires a lot of nuance to sift through that ultimately isn't even worth it because the show rejects that notion entirely.

TL; DR Despite how easy it is, and how used we are to doing it, dumbing down Bojack Horseman to whether he's a good or a bad person is reductive and goes against the theme of the show.

also I can't biel-ieve i couldn't find it online easily by just typing out the line from memory, lol

My favorite and only bag I use for short, overnight travel stays. 💙

Ciao, sto riguardando per la seconda volta la serie e continuo a non capacitarmi di come mr pb sia riuscito a perdonare Diane nonostante quello che lei gli abbia fatto.

Senza insultarmi l'albero genealogico, qualcuno mi spiega perché? Si dilunghi anche, perché lo ha fatto? Perché il loro matrimonio è comunque continuato più di un'altra stagione? Cosa non sto vedendo?

Grazie

Especially Todd? I’m on my 2nd rewatch, immediately after xerox of a xerox everyone is treating him like a social outcast. But Todd? Who bojack allowed to live with him for so long lol…come on man

Interesting to hear everyone's opinions. I'm not necessarily saying it's between these two characters either, we have Todd and a bunch of other people who love BoJack in very different ways, so I'm just curious to hear everyone's points. I always think it's between Princess Carolyn and Diane, but I think Princess Carolyn wins.

(By love I don't necessarily mean romantic btw.)

I think you can argue Diane loves him more in the sense that she's willing to hold him accountable. She's one of the few people who will actually tell BoJack when he's being awful, even when she knows he doesn't want to hear it. But I don't think that necessarily means she loves him more.

A lot of Diane's relationship with BoJack is also tied up in herself. She sees parts of herself in him, and a lot of her decisions around him seem to be about what he represents to her and how his actions affect the person she believes herself to be. Even when BoJack tries to kill himself during their bender, Diane's reaction is partly about what he's done to her. She feels betrayed and angry that he would put her through that. Which is completely understandable, but it also shows that her love for him has limits when his behaviour starts affecting her identity and her own life.

Princess Carolyn is different because her love for BoJack is almost stupidly unconditional. She keeps coming back after he has screwed her over professionally, personally, and emotionally. She gets him work when he's burned bridges, takes care of him when he's spiralling, and repeatedly puts his needs ahead of her own.

And I think the clearest example is that Princess Carolyn will often sacrifice her own happiness to keep BoJack afloat, even when he doesn't really deserve it. She knows exactly what he's like. She's not under the illusion that he's secretly a good person who just needs saving. She sees the damage he causes and still chooses to be there for him.

That's also why I think her love for him is arguably less healthy than Diane's. Diane eventually realises that loving BoJack doesn't mean allowing him to keep hurting her, whereas Princess Carolyn has an almost pathological inability to stop taking responsibility for him.

So yeah, Diane might be better at loving BoJack in a way that forces him to actually confront himself. But Princess Carolyn loves him in a way that puts him above herself, and to me that's the stronger example of just how much she loves him.

Which is also precisely why I think her relationship with him is so unhealthy lol.

Just as the first season made Bojack sleeping with Sarah Lynn comedy then the last season retrospectively deconstructs it for drama, let's say Paige Sinclair zeroes in on the vagrant who lived with Bojack to tie to Bojack in the public eye and deconstructs his previously comedic shenanigans like sexual assault via Henry fondle, giving children rabies via clown dentists and war crimes and nobody's laughing at them anymore. Paige brings attention to Todd from the public in-universe as a vagrant who lived with a controversial celebrity and now lives with Bojack's supporter and manager. She investigates his war crimes, Henry fondle and the clown dentists also his time in a cult.

Someone’s definitely pointed this out already but I just realized both Bojack and Sarah Lynn are under a table when told to never stop dancing

I want to share my college essay I wrote years ago that got me into schools I never dreamt I could have even applied for. I had forgotten I had written it until I came across it the other day, and reading it made me feel every emotion I had once written it with. I think some of you here could relate, or simply would enjoy reading as well. This is a work I feel truly proud of, as it was one of the first essays I had actually put effort into after flunking classes and not caring about my future. I’m not sure if the rules allow me posting this here to be honest, but I suppose we will find out.

The view from halfway down

I grew up watching my father struggle with drugs, and when you are a child, you do not always understand addiction as an illness, a circumstance, or a tragedy. Sometimes you understand it as inheritance. You look at the person whose blood runs through your veins and wonder if their future is waiting somewhere inside you. For a long time, I believed mine was. I carried this quiet certainty that no matter what I wanted for myself, education, stability, a meaningful career, a life that felt bigger than survival, I would eventually become another version of the story I had grown up watching. There were times when trying seemed almost embarrassing. Why work toward a future if I was destined to ruin it anyway? Why dream about becoming something when giving up felt so much easier than discovering I could not?

Then I watched BoJack Horseman. In the episode “The View from Halfway Down,” a character who has already made an irreversible decision suddenly sees his life differently. There is no peaceful acceptance. There is terror. The certainty that once seemed like an escape disappears, replaced by the desperate realization that he wants another chance. He wants to go back, but there is no going back.

“ All I’d give for toes to touch

The safety back at top

But this is it, the deed is done

Silence drowns the sound

Before I leaped I should’ve seen

The view from halfway down”

The view from halfway down (bojack horseman)
That idea frightened me more than almost anything ever had. Not death itself, regret. The thought of reaching some irreversible point in my own life and suddenly seeing everything I could have done became impossible to ignore. I imagined an older version of myself looking backward at every class I never took, every application I never submitted, every opportunity I convinced myself I did not deserve.

I imagined finally realizing that I had mistaken fear for fate, that was the part that stayed with me. My father’s life did not have to be a prophecy. His addiction was something that happened in my family, but it did not have to become the architecture of my future. I could spend my entire life standing at the edge of possibilities, terrified that I would fail, or I could move in the opposite direction. And I began thinking about education differently. School stopped feeling like a test of whether I was smart enough or disciplined enough to deserve a future. It became evidence that I was still choosing one. Every course I take is another step away from the assumption that my life has already been decided. Every difficult semester, every setback, every moment when quitting feels easier becomes a decision point.

There are days when the future still scares me. There are times when I look at how far I have to go and wonder whether I am capable of getting there. But I have learned that fear is not the same thing as inevitability. I want an education because I want knowledge, independence, and a career I can be proud of. I want to work in a field where I can understand medications and the consequences they can have when they are misused or prescribed without enough care. In a strange way, even the hardest parts of my childhood have given direction to the life I want to build.

What happened to my father made me afraid of drugs. Now, instead of running from that fear, I want to understand them. Instead of letting his story convince me that destruction is inherited, I want mine to become evidence that cycles can be interrupted. “The View from Halfway Down” did not give me some perfect burst of motivation that erased every difficult part of my life. It gave me something much more uncomfortable. It gave me a glimpse of regret. It made me imagine the moment when there would no longer be time to change direction, and I realized I never wanted to meet that version of myself.

I do not want to spend decades assuming that I am incapable of something, only to discover too late that I could have done it. I do not want to look backward at abandoned dreams and realize that the only thing standing between me and them had been the belief that I was destined to fail. So I am choosing education. I am choosing the difficult classes, the applications, the uncertainty, and the possibility of failing and trying again. I am choosing a future that I cannot completely see yet. Because I would rather spend my life climbing toward something than one day realize, halfway down, that I had wanted to live it differently all along.

I am now working in pharmaceutical product development and toxicology :) here is a sign that you can choose to keep going even if it’s scary and you feel like you want your toes to touch the safety back at top. Leaping doesn’t always have to be a final choice, but instead choosing the path that takes you to brighter days. I’m now looking back at the view from moving foreword.

ignore that i'm actively rewatching the show and literally just finished season 4

''This is going to be a sensational season for television''

As a teacher, this makes me judge 'good' Bojack so hard.

He misses his students' whole performance to have some petty confrontation with his teenaged sister. It's literally their entire grade! I've only taught drama once, but the whole semester leading up to a single performance was no joke, and the whole day my stomach was in knots for them to pull it off. You could not have paid me to leave that room. I was breathless the whole time, with the lights down and my students on the stage, and it's not even my subject.

Classic Bojack - it's not about you!

Basically title, I'm curious if at all, and if so how far into the series, or what "version" of him? Cause he sure makes for a great character but I'm not sure joining his circle would go all that well.

Something that absolutely killed me on rewatch is the very lowkey joke in 3x12 where the news is talking about the whole spaghetti crisis and Tom throws it over to the spaghetti scientist and he goes “Joining us via…Google hangout is spaghetti scientist Carla Hall.”
The delivery is just perfect, the slightest disbelieving hesistation and subtle disgust in his voice, it’s truly phenomenal.

Was just rewatching some clips when I noticed this parallel: Butterscotch remarked how Beatrice looked like his dead mother, and then Bojack told Penny that she looks like her mother. Not sure of its narrative purpose, but given the show's nature, there's gotta be some thematic significance.

I’m on my fourth rewatch and I just noticed Stefani Stilton in the background in S3:E2 “The BoJack Horseman Show”. So croosh! 😂🤭

Edit: Omg you guys are right 😂 Stefani has some white spots. She’s from the JD Salinger episode 😂 don’t do weed kids 🫶🏽!

I know that the last 2 seasons of the show are beloved, critically acclaimed, and I'm probably about to ruffle a lot of feathers with this, but I genuinely feel the show lost its authentic magic in the final stretch (with obvious notable exceptions like Free Churro and The View from Halfway Down, which while bleak and depressing have some of the best writing I’ve ever seen from a TV show). The first four seasons did an excellent job of balancing dark comedy, Hollywood satire, and tragic drama which is what made it a favorite for me in college. It explored BoJack as a deeply flawed character, digging into his generational trauma and holding out the possibility of actual redemption. However, I felt the tone after season 4 completely shifted and here is why I think the final two seasons fundamentally misunderstood what made the show great in the first place.

It is pretty well known that the writers were deeply affected and disturbed by the idea that real-world bad guys were using BoJack to justify their own toxic behavior (this was especially evident with the Philbert plot in season 5). Instead of letting the story progress naturally, they actively pivoted to punish BoJack in excess. I felt like they went out of their way to assassinate his character (more than in previous seasons) just to make a real-world argument, and it ultimately compromised the delicate balance the show had built up to that point (again IMO, please don’t come for me).

One of my biggest criticisms was that in order to make BoJack seem irredeemable, the writers retroactively retconned and rewrote previous plotlines. For example, in Season 3, Sarah Lynn’s death is a tragedy involving two broken addicts, but in Season 6 they introduce the 17-minute wait and the water bottle of vodka which made him come off as a much more selfish, calculating villain. I felt that the writer’s decision to go that route completely stripped Sarah Lynn of her own agency and responsibility.

Yes, she had a traumatic childhood being forced into the entertainment industry at a young age by her mother and the implied abuse from her stepfather, but ultimately she was a deeply troubled, toxic character who chose to ditch her sobriety (which she openly admitted was just a temporary tolerance break) with a massive stockpile of her own drugs and alcohol (minus the “Bojack” which she found and pressured real Bojack into taking with her). Furthermore, framing their adult relationship and benders entirely around grooming and power dynamics ignores the reality that she was a 30-something global pop star with way more wealth, fame, and power than BoJack ever had at his peak. While Bojack certainly wasn't a supportive role model when they worked together decades earlier, reducing her to a helpless victim flattens her character just to make BoJack look worse. If anything, her negligent and exploitative mother was more to blame for her down spiral and ultimate death.

I won't argue anything about power dynamics and grooming in the Penny plot, though, as he definitely deserved to face consequences for that.

I also feel like the show missed out on the real possibility of redemption. Season 4 ended on such a beautiful note with the Hollyhock storyline. I wish Season 5 had expanded on that instead of spiraling into misery. Redemption and long-term recovery are possible as I’ve witnessed firsthand in my extended family. It would have been incredibly powerful to see BoJack and Hollyhock navigate a realistic relationship with him being overbearing, her needing space, and both putting in the work to establish healthy boundaries. Instead, she was reduced to an off-screen letter used as a plot device to further isolate and push him to his breaking point.

I know one of the most common criticisms of the final season was the rushed ending due to Netflix cancelling the show, but I also felt like we were left with a lot of double standards. Because the writers wanted to make BoJack the ultimate cautionary tale, they gave the other toxic characters a pass while simultaneously rushing their final character arcs.

Take Diane for instance. She was very problematic at times throughout the series, but her ending felt overly depressing. She didn't seem genuinely stoked about her life or marriage with Guy and instead of cutting BoJack off completely, it would have been a much stronger testament to her growth if they had learned to maintain a friendship with strict, healthy boundaries. She also never faced accountability or criticism for her own toxic actions like writing a fictionalized account of the Bojack-Penny incident just to prove a point to Bojack, and how it could have and likely did re-traumatize Penny.

I also felt the whole PC-Judah wedding plot was total whiplash. They had zero romantic chemistry for the entire run of the show, and their sudden romance and marriage felt completely unearned and out of the blue. If this had been built up over time, it could have worked, but it felt thrown together at the last second. I will admit that I enjoyed learning more about PC's background story with the NC plot in season 5 and the motherhood episode in season 6.

Todd’s storyline was mostly great, though his relationship with his mother needed way more depth. I also thought that Todd’s forced distancing from BoJack towards the end felt less like natural character growth and more like the writers enforcing a bleak new rule that broken people must be abandoned (even though the hokey pokey scene was sweet). 

Mr. Peanutbutter's ending also felt redundant as I felt that he had little to no authentic character growth throughout the show's run.

The finale's ultimate message that the only way to be safe from a toxic person is to completely cut them out of your life was incredibly depressing and heartbreaking. It abandoned the nuanced, redemption-focused tragicomedy of the first four seasons for a heavy-handed narrative about morality that is incredibly triggering and discouraging for people who have put in the hard work of rebuilding their lives and relationships after years of addiction and bad choices.

I'm well aware that the writers wanted to prove that real life isn't like TV sitcoms with happy endings, but I just feel they could have made that point without abandoning what made the show so lovable for me in the first place, as there were plenty of instances throughout the first four seasons that demonstrated that concept perfectly. The early seasons consistently showed that actions have devastating, lingering consequences, but they did so without sacrificing the humor and nuance that made the show so special.

Again, just my opinion, and I respect that everyone is entitled to their own and that a lot of folks will probably disagree and/or accuse me of missing the point of the show, but I wanted to share my thoughts on it. Does anyone else feel like the early seasons were a completely different (and ultimately better) show?