BoJack Horseman and When Life and Death Don’t Fit the Rules of Television

CAUTION: This article contains major spoilers for Season 5 of BoJack Horseman.

There was a random forum post the other day, asking when movies stopped showing characters getting into elevators. Well, it was more complicated than that, but that was the gist. Movies used to show a character leaving a room, walking down the hallway, getting into a car, stopping for gas, arriving at the next location, etc. etc. etc. In the early years of film, that’s how you transitioned from one scene to another.

Then, Jean-Luc Godard happened. And suddenly movies just cut past all that stuff. A character would start in one room and then, boom, be someplace else, with a brief establishing shot or a quick dissolve or little more than a different backdrop to let you know what’s going on. Movies eventually came to trust their audiences to understand that the character on screen did all that boring transition stuff in the meantime, without needing to see it.

It was a product of early audiences’ growing film literacy. Now, that sort of cinematic grammar is second nature to most viewers. We don’t need to be told that Michel Poiccard didn’t apparate from one side of Marseille to another. We understand it intuitively, in a way that audiences in the 1960s didn’t, because we were raised on it — maybe not to the degree that BoJack Horseman was raised on T.V. and movies, but we still know enough to follow along without having to think about it.

The point is that there are expectations for how this whole T.V. show thing works. Even in the post-Sopranos, Peak T.V. era, where everyone wants to do something bold and different, there’s basic rules for what television is and how it’s deployed. You may not have A-plots and B-plots in your show. You may not have three cameras or rising and falling action. But there are rules, damnit, and you’d better abide by them or risk alienating your audience. (Or you can take refuge in being deliberately confusing which, naturally, means your show is daring and smart).

One of those rules is that you don’t have your character just stand around and talk to the audience for half an hour. Save it for your one man show. That sort of thing is meant for the stage. For television though, you need dynamism. You need things happening. You need multiple characters and incidents and developments or people will get bored. You can’t just leave your main character proverbially naked out there, especially not in an animated show where you’re not even limited in terms of sets or locations or visual variety in the way that live action is.

But BoJack Horseman does just that in “Free Churro”. It gives the audience twenty-one uninterrupted minutes of its title character giving his mother’s eulogy, recounting his family history, doing a gallows humor-filled stand-up routine, and processing the death of a woman he hated but whom he still desperately wanted the approval of, in one giant, stream-of-consciousness performance.

The episode has interludes of humor in the form of blackly comic quips and the occasional musical accompaniment gag. There’s a cold open that flashes back to a scene with BoJack’s emotionally-screwed-up and emotionally-screwing-up father where we see BoJack being taught to process the absence of his mother in a less than healthy fashion. But for the most part, “Free Churro” is just BoJack, in a room, practically talking directly to the audience, for an entire episode.

That is bananas. You could perform “Free Churro” as a monologue for your high school. You could print the whole thing out and turn it into one of those giant movie posters where the words create imagery from the film like some kind of literary pointillism. You could listen to it in the car and not miss much beyond the occasional coffin-side glance or impressionistic moment. It’s not something that had to be on television or that could only work in this medium.

And somehow, that’s what makes the episode feel as bold as it does, because it chooses to set aside all those tools in the T.V. toolbox that prompt us to feel things: the sad music, the hauntingly lit backdrops, the expressive reactions of other characters. It forgoes the sweeteners that help keep up the audience’s interest during a half-hour sitcom: scene changes, change-of-pace side plots, or pure comic relief.

Instead the episode just gives you a sad, messed up person on stage, digesting his relationship with his parents in real time for what amounts to an eternity on television, in the hopes that it can keep your attention, make you feel his pain, and thread the complex emotional and familial needles the series has been toying with for four and half seasons with words alone. And somehow it manages to pull it off.

Television is — as BoJack Horseman and BoJack Horseman both winkingly acknowledge — considered more of a writer’s medium than a visual medium. That’s slowly changing, but the idea stems from how T.V. started out as something much cheaper, much faster, and much more disposable than its cinematic brethren. There wasn’t money or time to worry about fancy imagery or incredible sets or stunning cinematography in the early days of television. You needed to film twenty or so episodes in about as many weeks and do it all on the budget provided, which meant the spark had to come from the talents of performers like Lucille Ball and the skills of writers who could make three cameras and two rooms feel like an entire world.

That’s the advantage of the T.G.I.F. shows that Horsin’ Around is spoofing. Sure, it’s easy to make fun of the laugh tracks, or the outrageous situations, or the cornball humor. But those shows emerged from a long and proud tradition, of folks who may have been cranking out content for a paycheck, but who also made some magic with the meager tools at their disposal, and who taught a generation of latchkey kids and people whose lives were far removed from the ease and security of a T.V. family what warm and good and happy could look and feel like.

It’s a feeling that BoJack has been chasing his entire life. That search has led him here, to a twenty-minute half-rant/half-confessional delivered to his mother’s coffin. And in those twenty minutes, he chews on his confused feelings about his parents, the way that he doesn’t so much mourn his mother but mourns the end of the possibility of earning her love that he didn’t really believe existed in the first place, the way that he tacitly admits his father taught him not to rely on her or anyone, the way he acknowledges the screwed up solace in admitting that you’re drowning together as a family, the way he cherishes those brief respites when you can stop and see your home life as something as graceful and happy as anyone else’s, the way we confuse and expect big gestures in lieu of the everyday work of being good and kind, the way we look for hidden depths and transcendent meaning in coffee mugs and placards in the I.C.U. and sad horse shows that may or may not be able to sustain them.

He does it all from a podium, a lectern, a stage, that lets all that raw emotion and complicated feelings spill out and then sit there with the audience. There’s no subplot to cut to, no wacky interlude from Todd to take the edge off, no break from a man making peace with the fact that he’ll never make peace. It’s just there, in one big dose, for BoJack and the audience to have to swallow at the same time, in a way that T.V. almost never makes its characters, let alone its audience, do.

T.V. is usually a gentler, easier, and more escapist institution than that, even at its most challenging and less-than-user friendly. If you watch the 1960s Star Trek show, you can see the wild new locales the show creates every week on the Paramount backlot and the occasionally repetitive but still differently-flavored guest stars who arrive on a weekly basis to fight, help, or confound our heroes. There’s a formula there, but it’s fun and flashy enough to keep your interest from episode to episode. And if you watched long enough, you’d recognize that every other episode seems to feature Captain Kirk schmoozing, smooching, or seducing his way out of (or into) whatever the problem of the week might be.

It’s easy to write off Captain Kirk as a BoJack-style womanizer, until you realize that T.V. was different in the 1960s. However more colorful and adventure-filled Star Trek was relative to the twenty-minute monologue of “Free Churro”, it was also intended to be disposable, watched once and never seen again, before Netflix binges or home video or even syndicated reruns made it reasonable to expect that people would try to string all these disparate stories together into one cohesive whole. You realize, then, that Kirk wasn’t meant to be a serial playboy in a series of continuing adventures. He was meant to be a passionate man who featured in a raft of disconnected stories that just so happened to involve the same characters.

Television shows at the time weren’t made to be holistic narratives told chapter by chapter. They were meant to be single-serving pieces of entertainment, a collection of short stories that shared familiar faces but which wiped the slate clean each time the credits rolled. Captain Kirk didn’t leap from bed to bed — he was just fated by the laws of television to find The One, and then lose her, over and over again. Because like BoJack says — and the arrival of the Starship Enterprise in last year’s new Star Trek series confirms — the show just goes on.

That’s what we do when people die. We try to make sense of the scattered strands of their lives and our relationships with them. We try to take all those individual moments that they lived, all those big events and the disparate moments we shared with them, and sew them together into some sort of narrative that makes sense to us.

But lives aren’t stories. They don’t always have happy endings, or arcs, or clean resolutions. Sometimes they just end. Sometimes you only see part of who your parents were and are and try construct the rest into something you can extract meaning from. Sometimes you only feel the ways your absent friends shaped you, or scarred you, and try to understand how and why it happened, now that they’re no longer around to be asked. Sometimes you take that rush of moments and try to build them into something you can wrap your head around, a series of episodes with lovable characters and continuity and choices that are as comprehensible as they are kind, whether they genuinely amount to all of that or not.

And sometimes, someone important in your life is gone and everything’s worse now. There are rules for television, unwritten laws for how we communicate with one another in the medium, expectations that the audience can carry with them, which may be subverted, but which have to be respected.

But life and death have no rules other than that each of us must experience both, however brief or painful or confusing that experience may be. And there are no rules for grief or the process by which we try to come to terms with the death of a parent or the marks left by their presence and absence in our lives. So BoJack Horseman breaks the rules of television, stops telling us stories, and just gives us twenty minutes of raw, writerly mourning and confession. “Free Churro”’s processing of that grief is as complex and familiar and yet unknowable as the real life tangles of living and dying are, without the comforts the glowing screen normally provides its hero, or its audience.