Bojack Horseman, season 4: Looking a gift horse in the mouth

“I’m a pit that good things fall into,” says Diane halfway through one of Bojack’s routine binge sessions.

Lines like this are why Bojack Horseman is probably my favourite show on TV. In this show, lines like this cut through the technicolour satire like a razor. They fall out of the characters’ mouths quietly and land like boulders. Lines like this are Bojack, Diane, Princess Carolyn, Todd, and others, realising the very worst things about themselves and each other and articulating them in the same instant.

Even worse, some motifs — like Bojack’s refrain “What are you doing here?”, or, most heartbreakingly of all, Sarah Lynn’s recurring sigh of “I want to be an architect” — are not in themselves so bad, but it’s the circumstances in which they’re said that force us to see how hopelessly trapped they all are by their own choices — like watching a car crash from across the street, helpless to intervene.

And then, of course, we reflect all that back on ourselves. We wonder whether we are deep pits that good things fall into. And if the answer to that isn’t yes sometimes, then congratulations: your life is better than mine.

This is deep shit for an animated sitcom.

The problem, as it turns out, is that this isn’t actually one of those lines. That she might be a deep pit that good things fall into isn’t a quietly shocking revelation for Diane; instead the line comes almost offhand in a fit of melodramatic hysterics. This points to a subtle departure in Bojack Horseman’s writing style — specifically, that Diane already knew this. Rather than being a shock realisation that shuts down her tantrum, it was instead a foregone conclusion that actually caused it. The distinction here is that we don’t get to be complicit in that thought process, because she’s already had it: and so the line loses its power.

Subtle shifts like this haunt the fourth season of Bojack Horseman. Its DNA is the same, but the chemistry feels somehow botched. The stories and characters behave as you’d expect them to — but that’s sort of the problem:

“Here’s the secret to being happy: just pretend you are happy, and eventually you’ll forget you’re pretending.”

I was really excited at the end of the third season to see shades of Todd that weren’t there before. Sadly he is largely relegated to his customary high-jinks entirely outside of the season’s main story arcs, and his asexuality goes disappointingly underdeveloped. In episode twelve he tells a potential love interest: “I’m asexual”; in the same perfunctory way that he told Emily a season ago — and neither he, nor we, understand it any better.

But while there are shortcomings in this season’s execution, a lot of that is down to a powerful formal ambitiousness to tell stories differently. Two of the show’s greatest episodes; ‘Escape from L.A.’ and ‘Fish out of Water’; hang heavily over this season, and its flow is frequently disrupted by radical stylistic departures. Sometimes they hit the nail on the head, like introducing Bojack’s internal monologue in ‘Stupid Piece of Shit’ (yes, that simplicity is what makes it so exquisitely painful); and sometimes they miss the mark, like the claustrophobic 127 Hours-esque ‘Underground’; one of a handful of episodes that pull the storytelling in a different direction but don’t really advance the plot in a meaningful way. Ultimately it’s more the comedy than the drama that falls victim to these disruptions. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a relief or a deal-breaker — although as far as comedy goes, Felicity Huffman’s guest role as the judge of “female-empowering” reality show Felicity Huffman’s Booty Academy is the show’s satire at its finest (“it was supposed to be ‘Felicity Huffman’s Future Leaders of America’, but it got retooled a little by the network…”).

At a macro level, season four carried an undercurrent of disappointment for me that the writers chose, like so many other sitcom and drama writers do at this stage in a show’s lifecycle, to test out Bojack in a simulated family environment. That feels like something other shows do. It’s not that it feels un-Bojack, I get that that’s the point; it’s that it feels un-Bojack Horseman. More broadly, it’s also just a bit weird that the main characters spend most of the season not really talking to each other at all; although that does give them space to deal with some of their own shit, like Princess Carolyn being forced into uncomfortable confrontation with her control issues, and Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter’s ever more bizarrely-nuanced marriage ending the season in a profoundly metamorphic state.

In any case, there’s an overriding sense of wondering when, and whether, it’s all actually going to come together. And it does — eventually. The penultimate episode ‘Time’s Arrow’ is a breathtakingly detailed psychological study which pulls apart all of the puzzle pieces we’ve been collecting over four seasons and deviously rearranges them into exactly the twist we were hoping for.

Here is where the story is entirely dependant on our intellect, attention to detail and an intimate understanding of the show’s world to put the clues together. In a scene with Bojack’s mother, at the exact moment that we start to wonder where we are in the show’s chronology, the “D” on the Hollywoo(d) sign visible from Bojack’s kitchen reappears out of thin air; a tiny, distant gesture that nonetheless places the scene — for all who know the intricacies of the Bojack Horseman universe — firmly in the past. This is the kind of astonishing and subtle craft I’d been missing for most of the season.

The previous two seasons delivered Bojack to depths of despair that rival the most serious of TV dramas — indeed, Sarah Lynn’s story arc in season three is amongst the most devastating pieces of television ever made. So it’s testament to the show’s compelling journey through the labyrinths of identity, complicity and self-loathing (and here the most minor of spoilers will follow) that something as simple as Bojack smiling is weighty and significant enough an image on which to drop out of a season.

That we got there in a way that feels totally right for Bojack, via a succession of storylines that sometimes felt totally wrong, is exactly the kind of oxymoron that makes Bojack Horseman so special.