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