Tania Hussain is an Executive Editor at Collider responsible for creative, editorial, and managerial duties. In addition to leading content ideation and development, she works to generate innovative and compelling ideas for feature articles and reviews with her editorial team across Features, Lists, Reviews, and Interviews. She also serves as the primary editor overseeing Collider’s Signature Series profiles, spotlighting some of the most influential voices in film and television. Tania has helped cover and ideate content for major events for Collider, including the Toronto International Film Festival. She has also conducted more than 100 interviews since her start in the business more than 15 years ago. Some favorites include Joel McHale, Charlie Cox, Jennifer Garner,** Tina Fey, Kate Winslet, Bob Odenkirk**, Andy Richter, Jordan Schlansky,** Jamie Dornan**,** Yeardley Smith, Rafe Spall,** Esther Smith, and a reasonable toss-up between Cookie Monster and Kermit the Frog. She has covered set visits, in-person junkets, and red carpets for several films and TV shows, including most recently, The Sheep Detectives, Masterchef, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.
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Leo Tolstoy once said that all happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways. Thus, it’s no surprise that happy families are so few. For a family to be happy, every little component needs to work together in harmony, but there are an infinite number of variables that could go wrong. So, it’s no surprise that dysfunctional families are so copious on TV. Each unhappy family has an often poignant, but always unique story to tell about itself. You have your Roys from ***Succession, ***Reynolds from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and Bluths from ***Arrested Development, ***each of them unhappy and dysfunctional in their own ways. But none of these families come as unhappy as the Horsemans from BoJack Horseman.
Most sitcoms tell us that the family we’re following is dysfunctional and use this dysfunctionality to extract humor. But BoJack Horseman goes a step beyond and asks why the Horseman family is the way it is. It oscillates back and forth across generations to uncover the reason behind the unhappiness of its individual characters, thus providing us with a depressing but satisfactory answer about their family’s unhappiness.
It’s difficult not to enter an introspective state after binging BoJack Horseman. The show lures its audience in with its anthropomorphic world, vibrant aesthetics, pop-culture references, and zany humor. But when the audience is fully hooked, it poses difficult questions about the everyday defilement and purification of existence, forcing deep reflection upon its viewer. The beauty of BoJack Horseman lies in how it neatly packages the nuances of the human condition and presents it in a manner that leaves the viewer with a lingering aftertaste.
Your answers point to the iconic universe your values, your instincts, and your particular way of seeing the world were built for. This is where you would find your people — and your purpose.
You believe in the cause — in the idea that freedom is worth fighting for even when the odds are impossible and the empire is vast.
You understand, in the deepest part of yourself, that the journey matters as much as the destination — and that the world’s beauty is worth protecting even at great cost.
You believe that love, loyalty, and doing what’s right are not naive sentiments — they are the most powerful forces in any world, magical or otherwise.
You see the world clearly — its power structures, its hypocrisies, its brutal arithmetic — and you are not paralysed by that clarity. You use it.
You believe the future is worth building — that curiosity, cooperation, and the expansion of understanding are not just ideals but the most practical path forward for any civilisation.
Indeed, the show’s best moments have risked being unabashedly honest about the internal turmoil that each character faces when having to choose between doing the easy thing and doing the right thing. And the protagonist we follow, BoJack Horseman (Will Arnett), is mostly inclined towards doing the easy thing. BoJack is a washed-up actor who is still living off the success of a sitcom that ended 20 years ago. We see him attempting to make a comeback into Hollywood, and along the way, we also see the horrible, horrible things he does — like sabotaging his best friend’s music career, inviting a friend who’s nine months sober to a bender and causing her death, strangling a colleague under the influence of drugs, and so much more. At the same time, we also get a glimpse into his depressing childhood, surrounded by emotionally abusive parents who starved him of love. The purpose of this backstory isn’t to make you forgive Bojack or make him likable, but to paint a nuanced picture of a character who comes from a dysfunctional family.
Most sitcoms treat the dynamics of a dysfunctional family with a heavy dose of absurdity, as it can be difficult to write gags about a situation so depressing. But when BoJack Horseman* *talks about dysfunctional families, it lets the humor recede into the background, bringing the reality of familial traumas to the forefront. The method that the show applies is that it doesn’t show us BoJack’s wretched childhood in one go, but it scatters the pieces throughout the show, allowing us to form a larger picture and contextualize what we’ve seen around it.
Both of BoJack’s primary caregivers, Beatrice (Wendie Malick) and Butterscotch (Arnett), were horrible at being parents. Beatrice seemed to *enjoy *hurling insults and hurtful, mean comments towards her son. She blamed BoJack for the loss of her youth, beauty, and potential, and it was her way of avenging the loss. She constantly told him that he was good for nothing and that he better grow up to be something great for all the damage he’s done. Due to her spiteful nature, there was never a moment where she showed any semblance of love and affection towards her son up until the very end. Additionally, BoJack’s father was inconsiderate and didn’t care if his words and actions were negatively impacting his kid currently in formative years. When BoJack caught his father having an affair with his secretary, Butterscotch got BoJack drunk and later blackmailed him about it to keep his lips sealed. This implies that BoJack’s father had a hand in carving out a path towards substance abuse for him. It’s difficult to say if it’s instances like these and more that resulted in BoJack becoming an alcoholic and an overall inconsiderate person, but his abusive upbringing certainly didn’t help.
For the first half of the show, we see a few glimpses of BoJack’s upbringing, making it easy for us to villainize his parents, especially his mother, Beatrice. But in Season 4, the show flips and takes us on a journey through Beatrice’s own childhood to map out the harrowing events that made her into the spiteful old woman she becomes. In the episode “The Old Sugarman Place,” we learn that Beatrice’s mom, Honey Sugarman (Jane Krakowski), had a son, Crackerjack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), who died in the war, and the grief struck her so badly that she was unable to function normally. During one such unmanageable bout of grief, she got drunk and crashed her car while little Beatrice was inside. The response from Honey’s husband wasn’t to talk to her or send her to a grief counselor, but to lobotomize her. Beatrice sees all of this when she is just little, and she notices that her mother has become a hollow person after the procedure. Still, Honey departs one crucial lesson to her daughter: love does terrible things to a person, and even makes little Beatrice promise that she’ll never love anyone as much as she loved Crackerjack.
In another episode, “Time’s Arrow,” we see that Beatrice was extremely insecure about her weight because of the inordinate amount of importance placed on appearance by her father. She was never allowed to eat ice cream because it would make her fat, and had to resort to eating lemon with sugar sprinkles as a treat. We also see her taking “pretty pills,” which are presumably some kind of weight loss supplement. And she seems to carry this insecurity surrounding looks all her life, passing it on to BoJack and even Hollyhock (Aparna Nancherla), BoJack’s half-sister, constantly shaming them for their weight. In the episode “Lovin That Cali Lifestyle!!” we learn that Beatrice was secretly spiking Hollyhock’s drinks with “pretty pills” to the point of overdose.
In turn, BoJack also passes on the trauma to his daughter figures. Beatrice instilled an unhealthy need to perform in BoJack, forcing him to sing a song at a party. When BoJack says he doesn’t feel like singing, his mother replies, “Nobody gives a damn what you feel like. You’ve got an audience out there, and they want to hear you sing. Now you want your mommy to love you, you go out there, and you do the only thing you’re good for, which is singing that lollipop song.” A few decades later, we see BoJack echoing the same lines to a young Sarah Lynn (Kristen Schaal) who is having performance anxiety. Indeed, the poison does drip through.
BoJack Horseman
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2014 - 2020-00-00
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
Amy Winfrey, JC Gonzalez, Adam Parton, Joel Moser, Martin Cendreda, Peter Merryman, Matt Mariska, Mike Roberts, Mollie Helms, Tim Rauch
