How did BoJack Horseman perfectly balance its silliest and darkest impulses? "Let's Find Out"

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.

If you’re looking to criticize BoJack Horseman, its fundamental identity crisis can be an easy place to start. There were times, after all, when the series could feel like two different shows, sometimes working in parallel, but occasionally simply at cross-purposes: The darker, richer character study of a bad horse trying, in fits and starts, to be anything else, and the blisteringly fast screwball comedy happening around it, smashing together Hollywood satire, blazingly fast tongue twisters, and a huge dose of sheer silliness to overwhelm the senses. (There’s a reason a lot of fans will tell you the series doesn’t really start clicking until season one’s “The Telescope,” the first time those former elements really manage to come online.) It can be exhilarating, but also exhausting, to go from one of the series’ darkest moments—the climax of season three’s “That’s Too Much, Man!”, say—straight into a plot about well-meaning dopes Todd and Mr. Peanutbutter saving an underwater city by getting sexy orcas to use a backlog of pasta strainers to get a bunch of boiling pasta out of the Pacific Ocean. 

There are, though, episodes that manage to hold both of these threads together—to weave the show’s darkness, its deep skepticism about the difficulties of actually being seen by another living being—together with its love of goofball antics and making fun of television. “Let’s Find Out,” one of the standout episodes of the show’s second season, is one such episode, and it’s worth doubling back and examining it in detail for a minute to see how BoJack managed the trick.

We start firmly in comedy land, as director Matt Mariska walks us through an animated version of an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk, introducing us to the behind-the-scenes world of the TV show we’re about to watch being made: J.D. Salinger Presents Hollywoo Stars And Celebrities, What Do They Know? Do They Know Things? Let’s Find Out!! (This whole episode is low-key a Sorkin pastiche, actually, from Tatiana Maslany’s one-shot guest star character, to the visual style, to the game show’s announcer making sure to let us know JDSPHSACWDTKDTKTLFO is shot on “the historic Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”) BoJack (Will Arnett) is currently in a fairly good place, to the point that he’s doing a favor for his new girlfriend, coma-victim-turned-TV-executive Wanda (Lisa Kudrow). (It occurs to us, the deeper we get into this paragraph, what a nesting doll of jokes and premises this show can sometimes be.)

We get a nice sense of the tenor of the relationship early on, when Wanda asks BoJack if he actually cares about the show she’s making, and which he’s agreed to be the first celebrity guest on. “Sweetie, no!” he responds happily, pouring a shot of booze into his coffee. “I think this is stupid, and a waste of everybody’s time. But you’re my girlfriend, and I care about you, so I’m here.” Which is, we in the audience already know, a pretty selfless and romantic gesture, at least on the BoJack curve.

Although it puts its focus on series stars Will Arnett and Paul F. Tompkins (with brief assists from Amy Sedaris and Aaron Paul, Alison Brie having sat this one out), “Let’s Find Out” is anchored by a couple of near-perfect guest performances. We get the first, and the best, almost immediately, as Wanda makes her way to the show’s control hub: the legendary Alan Arkin, playing the legendary J.D. Salinger, who, in the universe of BoJack Horseman, faked his 2010 death, only to be lured back out of obscurity by the chance to produce a TV quiz show about celebrity trivia knowledge. It’s the kind of premise that could easily spin out into pure, ungrounded silliness, which is why you need a guy like Arkin in the role: Channeling a blend of megalomania and control freak tendencies, he manages to make you genuinely believe that Salinger cares just as much about the artistic merits of celebrity game shows as he did about any of his books or stories, while also delivering lines like “If only I’d had a kiss cam for Catcher In The Rye—well, just one more regret in a long list of many.” Or, indeed, delivering the nastiest and most pointed of the episode’s many little Sorkin slams, reminding a control room full of peons that “Nothing is more important than television, and no one more important than the people who make that television!” Cue that Patrick Carney theme.

“Let’s Find Out” keeps things light for most of the first half of its run, with lots of the comedy coming from just how ridiculous Hollywoo Stars And Celebrities actually is—and how laser-focused it is on knocking BoJack out of his hard-fought comfort zone. (For no reason ever explained, new segments are introduced with flashing red lights and a voice screaming bloody murder, to the obvious delight of the crowd.) The temperature increases when it’s revealed that BoJack’s actually only been brought on to be the episode’s “little celebrity,” in contrast to Big Celebrity Daniel Radcliffe, voicing himself as a smarmy self-caricature who can’t be bothered to remember BoJack’s name. With Salinger’s hand on the dial, the whole thing is a deliberate pressure cooker, with BoJack’s ever-fragile ego the volatile ingredient.

So far, so sitcom. (The episode’s B-plot, which sees Todd engage in typical Toddfoolery opposite Maslany’s hyper-professional Mia, is similarly funny, but rote—although Maslany gives a performance we wouldn’t have minded seeing her repeat at some point in the series, and the final rom-com fakeout is pretty solid.) By this point in its second season, pushing an initially friendly BoJack past his limits, causing him to drastically overreact, has become a pretty standard part of BoJack Horseman’s playbook. The breaking point comes when BoJack, out of affection for Wanda, throws a question about his hero Secretariat so that Radcliffe can be the big hero—only for Mr. Peanutbutter to begin comically, and aggressively, razzing him for his lack of knowledge. The show’s character animation, always great, captures the moment when BoJack goes from coping to completely over it, his body language shifting into a look of hateful boredom that often crops up when his priorities have shifted to the all-important art of hurting the person hurting him. Which he does, by hitting Mr. PB where BoJack knows he’s vulnerable: his rocky marriage to the show’s deuteragonist, Diane Nguyen.

For one of the first times in pretty much the entire series, Peanutbutter’s voice actor, the great comedian Paul F. Tompkins, drops his voice out of the registers of enthusiasm, and into recognizably human levels of hurt. And then anger, as BoJack continues to push, and as a sitcom-style fight between friends quickly escalates into something nastier, with Mr. Peanutbutter saying he knows BoJack tried to kiss his wife during a climactic moment of the show’s first season. (Asked how he found out, Mr. Peanutbutter is the more emotionally intelligent person in the room for maybe the first time ever: “Well, there are roadside cameras all along the P.C.H., and I have a few friends in the Highway Patrol, and she told me, of course, we’re married!”) Back in the control booth, Salinger calls for in-studio rain, demanding it because he’s “J. Goddamn D. Goddamn Salinger!”. And so, the rain begins to fall.

What follows is a thesis statement moment for BoJack Horseman, akin to the confrontation at the end of “The Telescope.” When Mr. Peanutbutter demands to know why BoJack consistently treats him like shit, Arnett (whose lack of an Emmy win for this series borders on criminal) goes soft, instead of loud or angry. “Because… I’m jealous.” Not of Diane, or Mr. Peanutbutter’s success. (Which, the yellow lab angrily notes, is comparable, if not inferior, to BoJack’s own.) No, it’s “Everything… I want to feel good about myself. The way you do. And I don’t know how. I don’t know if I can.” Arnett’s big, booming, cartoonish voice has never sounded smaller. “I’m sorry, Mr. Peanutbutter. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” (Salinger, in the booth: “I knew it! I knew this show would bring us to the heights of human drama more powerfully than literature ever dreamed!” It’s hard to express what a good time Arkin is having with these lines.)

We cut to commercial, and a backstage confrontation between PB and Wanda. Kudrow’s mostly been hanging out on the comedy side of the episode’s equation (with a running, and now very dated, joke about the show’s “second-screen experience” that includes the immortal line “QueefBurglar69. He’s their leader.”) But she gets in a quick reminder of why she’s been the Friend with the most interesting subsequent career, reminding her employee that it’s time to put a smile and a happy ending on his and BoJack’s ugly, emotionally wounding fight. “This is network television,” she reminds him. “Resolving everything cleanly in a half-hour is kind of what we do. You want to host a game show where everybody feels bad at the end, you can get in your little car, drive to Santa Monica, and pitch it to AMC.” (It’s at this point the horror strings on the soundtrack are kicking in.) “But these people want resolution, okay? So you get your little butt back on that stage, and you resolve.” It’s a deeply uncomfortable moment, as we watch Mr. Peanutbutter reconcile to the reality of once again papering over raw feelings in the interest of entertainment. (It also leaves the viewer with no true catharsis, only a reflection on the fake stuff most TV episodes peddle.) But who cares about that? Kiss-Cam time!

“Let’s Find Out” is neither the most emotionally affecting, or the funniest, episode of BoJack Horseman. But it is, arguably, the episode that best balances the two halves of the show’s sometimes fractious soul. (“Free Churro” defenders, we see and honor you; we’d argue that its total smashing of the show’s format makes it harder to talk about in this context, but it’s still a noble pick.) By ramping the heaviness of the material up and down, it avoids whiplash while letting you live in discomfort; milks real laughs out of fantastic guest performances while also allowing the show’s cast to explore new aspects of their characters’ inner lives; indulges in both the show’s most absurdist impulses, and its fascination with the real and the awful and the ugly. Also, it ends on what might be the single most mean-spirited moment of the entire series, and that goes a long way with us: A pitch-black joke about the lengths BoJack Horseman will go to in the name of spite. After all: If all of this is stupid, and a waste of everybody’s time, why not make the happy bastards feel, just for a moment, as bad as you do every single day? It’s the BoJack Horseman way.