Raphael Bob-Waksberg on building BoJack Horseman to last

Back in the 2010s, there was a very famous TV show, one that captured The A.V. Club‘s imagination for six seasons. As BoJack Horseman turns 10 this week, we’ll be looking back at the engrossing animated comedy with a series of essays and interviews. This is BoJack Horseman Week.

In this brave new world of “un-renewals” and decades of programming being scrubbed from existence, it can feel like you’re tempting fate by describing any series as one that’s made to last. But 10 years since its debut, BoJack Horseman is proving to be just that. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s exceptionally poignant animated comedy continues to find new fans, many of whom are struck by its showbiz satire, including its take on famous abusers’ apology tours, and the prescience of its depiction of digital media. But older fans are right there alongside them, revisiting the series, which ran from 2014 to 2020, and finding some new insight in BoJack’s (Will Arnett) rocky journey from has-been to still-could-be, or another clever sight gag in Lisa Hanawalt’s vibrant production designs. 

Even the series’ (limited) flaws remain instructive. The uneven first season that gave way to a brilliant tragicomedy serves as a potent reminder that TV shows need time to grow, and the “original sin” created by colorblind casting gave Bob-Waksberg an opportunity to apply the show’s ethos—that we can all try to be better—in the real world. To say BoJack Horseman merely “holds up well” would be like omitting the “Esteemed” from versatile character actress Margo Martindale’s in-show moniker; it doesn’t capture the complete picture. 

That’s one of the reasons why we decided to dedicate a miniseries of features to the show and its impressive tonal tightrope walk, knack for shrewd parody, unflinching introspection, and unsung heroes. Naturally, we also had to sit down (via Zoom) with Bob-Waksberg, who’s had ample time to reflect on his series—the joy it continues to bring to viewers and the lessons he’s learned from it, including the realization that he may be done with antiheroes for a while.

In 2020, you did the usual round of interviews on how you came up with the show’s ending and what the show’s legacy might be. Looking back, do those thoughts mostly hold up or are you finding that the show’s afterlife looks different than you originally envisioned?

Raphael Bob-Waksberg: I am surprised and grateful that people are continuing to discover the show. That’s something that I don’t think I quite anticipated, although I could feel even then that new people were still finding it because I remember being mystified why we got canceled. No, no, we still got a ways to go on this! But it is wild to me when I see stuff online from fans who weren’t old enough for the show when it first came out, or just discovering it now. I think I knew that the people who experienced this show while it was on will always have fond memories of it. I do feel like we were one of the good ones and we were definitely appreciated in our own time. It has been really surprising and rewarding for me to see people are still finding it and still falling in love with it in spite of some parts of it feeling a little dated or irrelevant. That, as a whole, it seems like it’s holding up, which is great. And not just as a nostalgic artifact, it holds up as a new thing if you start watching it now.

What do you think is behind that constant discovery-slash-rediscovery?

RBW: I think there are a few things going on with the show that allow it to be revisited. One is, it is a very dense show—we crammed so much into it. We would write these long scripts and then in editing we would just squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and take a little bit out of here, a little bit out there. By the time we ended up with an episode, it was this tightly compacted, I don’t want to say “perfect” thing because it was of course still messy and interesting, but it was the best of the best.

There are people who really love the goofiness of the show and how silly it is and maybe get through the more serious moments, and there are people who do not care for the comedy at all, but are very invested in the drama of the show. I’d like to think this is a show that works for both of them, that it never abandons one side of that for too long. I also think it is a show that grew with us. I made that show over seven years or so; I became interested in different things as we were doing it, and I allowed all of that to funnel into the show itself. And I think that’s true for all the people who worked on it, that it never was just one thing for too long because we were feeling different ways about the things that we were talking about on the show. That also allows an audience to, no matter where you are at in your life, find something to engage with and connect with.

Thinking back to the first season, did you always intend to make the satire more pointed as time went on, or did that just happen naturally over time?

RBW: I think that was always part of the plan. I mean, in season two, we had our Hank Hippopopalous episode—when we were developing it originally, it was much more sharp and satirically targeted at specifically Bill Cosby. And I remember Netflix really pushed back on that. At the time, I was really annoyed with that note because I thought, “Oh, Netflix is developing something with Bill Cosby. They’re covering their asses. This is so obnoxious that we have to water this down and make it a more general pastiche.” And then while we were developing the episode, all Bill Cosby stuff came out and suddenly everyone was talking about it. It was no longer this thing that weirdly people don’t talk about. By the time the episode came out, we weren’t breaking any news. Everyone’s talking about Cosby.

And I was like, oh, thank God we made this a little more general because if this was just about Bill Cosby, people would be like, “What are they talking about, this guy that gets away with everything? [Cosby’s] about to go to jail.” So, now I’m really grateful—that was a really good note. And the truth is there were other guys like that. As far as how it became more timely as things went on, I think we were reacting to the moment a little bit, and we were also thinking, “What are we saying about our characters?” 

Then in season five, we really bring it back around to BoJack himself. I thought it was a really fun discovery of like, oh, yeah, we’ve been doing kind of satire and criticism of these kinds of people or this kind of society or system. But we also have a character who really benefits from that. And are we the audience, the people who make the show, the world of the show, turning the same blind eye to BoJack as maybe we’ve criticized others for doing for these other characters? I wasn’t trying to say, “Shame on you for liking BoJack. He’s just as bad as those other guys.” I was more interested in investigating this idea of well, he’s not just like a straw man villain, he’s someone that we are hopefully somewhat attached to because we know his pain and his trauma and where he’s from and why he is the way he is, but also we can’t ignore these bad things that he’s doing. That’s so much more interesting than “Isn’t it dumb how we don’t hold abusers to task in theory?” 

I’ve always been struck by how the show filled in the blanks with a plausible explanation, but not justification, for how someone like BoJack came to be the person he is. What’s just as bold to me is the moment that Diane, and I’m paraphrasing, says no one is just good and no one is just bad; bad people do good things and good people do bad things. The ambiguity there and in the ending is something I think a lot people still struggle with today; there are people who see Homelander as the hero of The Boys, and those who think a show’s moral messaging needs to be spelled out lest it be misinterpreted.

RBW: Well, this is kind of an in-retrospect observation, that you could not entirely neatly, but in some ways cleave the show in half. We did 77 episodes, and the middle episode is “The Old Sugarman Place,” where BoJack goes to Michigan. I think of the first three seasons as the Horsin’ Around seasons and the second half of the show as the Philbert seasons. The contrast we were creating was between our show and a show like Horsin’ Around, or real shows like Family Guy or Futurama. You think it’s going to be this fun silly comedy, but there’s some darkness there, and we’re building up a continuity in a different way, and we’re structuring things a little more like a drama; all the tension, the surprises that come out of that fueled a lot of the comedy and the storytelling of those first few years. And then what happened is people started to compare us to some of those dramas that had been our inspiration, like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos.

The second half of the show is almost like contrasting our show with those very self-serious dramas—I don’t mean Mad Men or Breaking Bad or Sopranos, but their worst imitators—and the ways in which we don’t want to be the typical dramatic anti-hero shows. A big thing for me always was just not glorifying this character because you only have so much control over how the audience takes it. I wanted BoJack to be sympathetic and you want to be rooting for him and rooting for him to be better and improve, but he’s never an object of adulation for our audience. He’s so pathetic. I think there are people who relate to that and who are rooting for that, but I don’t think there are people who aspire to be like BoJack. 

When you think back to that final season, do you find that you seemed more optimistic then, or do you feel more optimistic about somebody like BoJack now?

RBW: I’ve always felt like BoJack Horseman was an optimistic show, but a cautiously optimistic show. I feel like that was an A.V. Club catchphrase at one point: “We’re cautiously optimistic.”

Cautiously optimistic, yep.

RBW: And obviously, different people can take different things out of the show. I’ve seen the show described as bleak or nihilistic, and I don’t necessarily agree with that read, but it’s not my show anymore. Some people’s takeaway is it’s too dark, too heavy, too bitter, or it’s all about how people don’t change. I don’t think that’s the show that we made. I remain cautiously optimistic about humanity and man’s ability to change. I’m not Pollyannaish about anything, but I don’t know, I can’t help it. I don’t see the world as being bleak or hopeless, and I don’t think people are bleak or hopeless, as frustrating as some people can be. And I don’t know if that was ever the message of the show.

When I pitched the show, the two questions that I wrapped around it in my initial pitch to Netflix was how can a person be happy and how can a person be good? I connected those two things, even though they’re not always related, but that was to me the twin goals of the series, is BoJack struggling with those questions and figuring out how to answer them for himself. And I think what the show posits is, they’re the same—that you find some sort of, not happiness necessarily, but equanimity or peace, perhaps, by choosing to do the right thing and doing it, making that choice over and over again. I feel like the show is pretty unambiguous on that point, even though it is a nuanced show in other ways, and not everything’s a straight line and people can interpret what they will in it and take what they get out of it. But I think that it’s woven into the fabric of what the show is, that idea, even though the characters don’t always follow that.

I do think I’m less interested in the problematic man genre now because I feel like there was a saturation point that we hit as far as movies and TV shows were concerned. We were definitely a part of that, but I don’t know if I have more to say about it. I’m glad that I got to say all the things I wanted to say about that type of guy. Although, I mean, we’re all problematic. The truth is we’re all working through some stuff, and I’m not going to suddenly start writing characters who are not problematic in any way, who have no conflict or issues or traumas. I don’t think that’s in my future, but I think I am less acutely interested in the ups and downs or the redemption questions around a guy like BoJack. I feel like I explored that.

In that same spirit of making a conscious effort to do better, you seemed to really take in the criticism about Alison Brie’s casting as Diane Nguyen, especially toward the series’ end. With the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would do differently in how you handled that matter? 

RBW: I’ll say two things about that. One is I think there is so much conversation within this conversation about Alison Brie and the casting of Diane. I see similar things on other shows and other movies that’s so much about the casting. And I actually feel like a more important aspect of the show for me and my blindspot was in the writing. I think Alison, not ironically, became the face of the issue, but a bigger part of the issue is that the character of Diane did not fully feel lived-in, like an actual Vietnamese-American woman, more so because we were not thinking of her that way in the writing. I think if we had Vietnamese-American writers on staff thinking about that character and all the fullness of all the things she was, then the casting would not have been as glaring an issue. Not saying the casting was not also an issue, but that has been, as I reflect and as I put other projects together, that’s been more of the lasting thought for me of how I want to move forward. I think casting is maybe more front-facing, and so people are reacting and thinking about it more. 

But for me, just as important—in some ways, more important—is how am I telling these stories, and am I thinking about all the things that these characters are and staffing my rooms appropriately? That obviously is also not an exact science because we’re creating made-up people and no one person is going to check all the boxes of exactly who this person is. I’m working on a thing right now—I can’t really talk about the thing I’m working on right now, but when that thing comes out, we can talk about it again—but you can’t always find an exact one-to-one match of all the different ways the person is. But you need to be thoughtful about it and to try to be conscious of what you’re doing and how you’re telling the story. What are the different angles of this character, and do I have people in the room who can help me think about that in ways that I don’t even know about? What are my own blindspots? What are my unknown unknowns, and who’s going to help me with that? 

The other big change is that for most of the run of BoJack, I was really afraid to have that conversation with Alison. And I wish I hadn’t been, because I think she was also going through her own journey with that character and her own feelings of appropriateness of her playing Diane. And I feel like we isolated ourselves—I think I was nervous about bringing it up with her, making her feel bad, with her feeling like she had to defend herself. And I think she was nervous about bringing it up with me, but I look at what Big Mouth did with [Missy] and what Jenny Slate was so proactive about doing, and I felt like, oh, we could have had that conversation too, and we didn’t. 

The other thing I realized too late in the run of BoJack is that we could have recast it once we felt it was a problem. I think with us, by the time we were having those conversations, we were already in the last season, and it felt like, well, why do it now? But I was so nervous to even raise that conversation because I was afraid—I didn’t want to throw some Vietnamese actress into replacing this white actress, and then she’s going to get blowback from that. But seeing how elegantly Big Mouth did it was like, oh, I was overthinking this. But we did it too: We recast Pickles, and we did it with Hong Chau one season and Julia Chan the next season, and it was fine. And it was like, oh, it’s the same character. Nobody’s confused about this. Maybe people might notice the slight change in voice, but most aren’t even thinking about it. We did it with Sextina Aquafina too [Daniele Gaither replaced Aisha Tyler in season three]. There wasn’t as much pressure on it, but it actually wasn’t that big a deal. I think I could have been more open earlier to talking about that; I didn’t have to be so precious about that.

As BoJack was ending, you said you were hopeful that there would be an animation boom in the wake of the show. Do you think that wish has borne out? 

RBW: When I initially had those conversations, I was thinking specifically of the shows I was working on like Tuca & Bertie and Undone, which I felt really were not just following in the wake of BoJack, but were pushing things even further. I was maybe overly optimistic that those shows would find mainstream success and a larger cultural footprint. The truth is, there’ve always been shows that take risks, that do things really well, but are maybe off the beaten path. And it’s hard for those shows to find broad appeal or to really gain the respect of the networks to be treated in the way that they need to have a long life.

I’m a little disappointed because I did think there was an opportunity to push things wider, and that the success of BoJack might teach networks that you have to take a little time. As I said, BoJack continues to find an audience, and it benefits from having 77 episodes to really explore and to be so many different things. One of the big reasons that BoJack is such a success is you get to the end of 77 episodes and you’re ready to start back over again. If you cancel a show after 16 episodes, it’s just not enough. It’s not enough for people to get lost in it in that same way. 

Right now, just looking at the industry and looking at the business, it feels like we’re in a contraction period where networks are even more skittish about taking those kinds of risks, about giving shows those long leashes to find themselves to become successful. There’s a lot more emphasis on immediate results, which is ultimately shortsighted because they’re missing out on a lot of success by cutting off these shows. I would hope that networks and executives would trust themselves more and know, “This is a good show. We know this is good. Let’s give this the space and figure out a way to get people to this show because the show works,” as opposed to “Well, the numbers aren’t there, I guess it’s not a good show. I guess we have to cancel it.” 

That frustrates me. I don’t think we’ve seen the animation boom that I would’ve liked or hoped for, but I do think there’ve been a lot of really cool, great animated shows that have come out in the last four years since BoJack ended. There are all kinds of different kinds of animated shows, and I don’t want to disparage those projects and how cool and risky they are, and I’m excited to see what’s still yet to happen. I don’t think it’s too late.

Do you think you could get BoJack green-lit today in the current climate?

RBW: I think it would be tricky to get a season two of BoJack today—that, to me, is the bigger question mark. We were very lucky that we premiered at a time when our network was giving a longer leash to shows. I think if we’d been on a traditional network that was looking at the Nielsen numbers of each individual episode, we would’ve gotten canceled after episode four. We were maybe borderline for a while, but there was real belief in what we were doing. And I don’t know if that belief is enough now. 

I don’t want to say, “Oh, no, you couldn’t get away with the stuff we’re doing now. We would get canceled!” I don’t know if I would make BoJack now. [Laughs.] It’s like there’s 100 counterfactuals to think about what would BoJack be if it were made now because it wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t be commenting on the same stuff or telling the story in quite the same way. Now, I think a lot of the satire on BoJack might feel more tired or might not hit the same way. It wouldn’t feel as current. Although to circle back, people are still discovering it and still enjoying it. So what do I know? [Laughs.]

That’s the thing, though—the storylines don’t feel dated. What the show had to say about merger mania and clickbait journalism and Hollywood assistants going on strike–

RBW: And the Gizmodo-branded mix of advertorial…

[Laughs.] Exactly. It all still feels so relevant, and it’s something that I imagine is trickier with animation, because you’ve got to work with a longer lead. 

RBW: I think what animation does, because it’s a longer lead, because it’s not Seth Meyers commenting on what’s happening right now, is force you to be a little less topical and a little more big picture. If we’re satirizing things, what are the trends that we’re satirizing as opposed to the specifics? Instead of being like, oh, we’re really going to take it to that individual celebrity over this gaffe, you think well, in a year from now, no one’s going to remember that. So, what’s the larger meaning behind that? What does that represent or what are we trying to do or trying to say?

I think part of what you’re responding to is that there’s so much in there because it wasn’t just my show. I had the things that I was interested in, but I had a room full of brilliant writers who would come in with the stuff that they were thinking about or that they were reacting to or the things that annoyed them or that they wanted to comment on. One of the things that I’m proud of in making that show is there were jokes on the show that I didn’t even get, that I’m like, I don’t think that joke is for me, but clearly this part of the room is laughing or there are things that I didn’t even realize was a joke. And then two years later, I’m like, “Oh, wait a second. That was a parody of this thing.” 

I had multiple drafts that survived the radio play, the animatic, the final animation. It didn’t even register to me that it was a joke, but someone else is going to get that immediately. And to have the writers, and also Mike Hollingsworth, our supervising director, and his team of animators throwing in additional stuff and jokes, and Lisa Hanawalt and her team of designers throwing in more and more references. It just feels like it’s this overstuffed—hopefully in a good way—kind of overflowing thing that, again, depending on where you’re at, you’re going to get different stuff out of it. So, you might get tired of this joke that you’ve heard 20 times as you’ve watched the show 20 times, and maybe on the 21st time you suddenly appreciate this other joke in a new way that never quite struck you until now. And so I’m really proud of what everyone did, and of my own ability to let other people do things and encourage other people to do things and not just make it The Raphael Bob-Waksberg Project.

It’s one of the things that I love about it when I watch it now and I go, “Oh, that’s a Nick Adams joke, or that’s a Kelly Galuska joke, or a Shauna McGarry joke, or a Joanna Calo joke,” or even not remembering who pitched that moment, but knowing like, “oh, that feels a little Peter Knight to me.” That feels like his kind of influence. Even if he didn’t pitch that specific joke, there’s a little bit of him in there. Or, oh, this whole area of stuff wouldn’t have happened if not from Mike Hollingsworth. I get a lot of joy out of that. I mean, watching the show now, this is just me, my experience, it feels like thumbing through an old photo album or a yearbook like, “Oh, remember that? Remember we talked about that? Remember that?”

People who didn’t work on the show but are revisiting the show have their own connections to it. It’s revisiting art that you loved at a certain point that reminds you of the person you were then. And that’s cool too. I love it when I’m listening to Spotify on shuffle and a song comes on that I haven’t heard since high school. All of a sudden I’m like, “Oh, it takes me back.” And I like feeling that the longer BoJack exists, the more it can be that for people as well—reflecting on how you’ve changed, but also being reminded of who you were. I think it’s a beautiful thing.