Bojack Horseman is a bad comedy but maybe not a bad show

Bojack Horseman is a half hour adult animated comedy created by Netflix and put out this past August 2014. It's shooting for exactly the target you think it's shooting for. And since it's on Netflix, it's PACKED with actors I like. Seriously, the main cast is Will Arnet, Alison Brie, Amy Sedaris, Paul F Tompkins, and Aaron Paul.

The premise is that Bojack (Arnet) is a late-40s horse (this world is populated by about 50% humans and 50% anthropomorphic animals) and also the star of the 80s sitcom "Horsin' Around!" which put him as the father figure to three rascally kids (it's Full House). So take that target you were imagining before and add in the theme of "everything used to be great in the 80s before we realized that everything sucks and now everything sucks".

These days, Bojack sits around generally being an asshole, wasting his life, and wishing he was still valued by someone. His agent (Sedaris), an anthropomorphic cat named Princess (get it? She's named Princess because she's a cat, kind of like how Bojack is kind of a horse name), spends more time cleaning up Bojack's messes than getting any real work done, and she's now pressuring him to open up to a ghost writer (Brie) who looks like she can write him a great memoir that will bring some money in.

Maybe you stuck it through those descriptive paragraphs, maybe not. It's not that exciting of a premise. I should've just said "adult animated comedy, main character is anthropomorphic horse slash washed up 80s sitcom star, cue animal jokes and light-hearted nihilistic themes". Yeah, let's go with that.

I watched the first episode of Bojack because I wanted a half hour comedy. Haven't found a new one I like in a while, and having 13 episodes all ready to go from a just released show is always appealing (the internet is going to kill TV, etc, etc).

I did not think it was funny. The jokes were all lame. The dialog frequently brandished exposition in my face, hoping against hope that the flimsy jokes laid on top of said exposition would disguise its true nature. Well sorry, but that only works with funny jokes and even then only sometimes.

At this point I intended to throw up some YouTube links to the not funny jokes so you could see how they're not funny, but for some reason it's hard to find copywritten material that isn't funny and / or music on YouTube. Suffice to say if you want proof, go watch the first episode and see if you agree with me.

Anyway, after a day or so, I got bored at my computer again and felt like giving the show another chance. I'm not sure why, but I was bored, so what the hell. Afterwards, I felt basically the same way about it, if not even more pessimistic. But I watched a third ep. And a fourth. And eventually I realized that the rest of my afternoon was doomed to be spent watching the rest of this show.

It never got funny. I think in twelve episodes I laughed out loud four times. Not a good hit ratio. But by the end, I did have an appreciation for the show. Because it turns out the show made for a decent drama.

I don't know if I can think of a half hour comedy other than Arrested Development that took the time to really try and give itself a long term plot, and even AD didn't make the effort Bojack makes over its first season to try and see its characters grow and change. Seriously, it's weird. Every major character has depth by the end of the season, each of them are empathetic in their own way. Most of them are really sad and pathetic, because that's the point the show is trying to make. And it's not the most groundbreaking show in the world, but it does a decent job of doing all that from a dramatic standpoint, even leading to really nice last scene of the season, a moment that I think took a lot of guts to end on.

Except for it didn't really, because the show still feels like such a throwaway. I'm sure the production values are so low they could basically do whatever they wanted (given the animation, the entire budget probably went to writers and cast), and Netflix is making a name for itself trying to do things that wouldn't be done on TV. This is definitely a show that would've been canceled after a few episodes on TV and had what little depth and arc was there in the first few eps beaten out of it. In the end, it's not risky to end on an interesting / very much not funny moment in a show like this because there are NO stakes. Nothing is riding on this show. The only marketing is going to be suggestions to people on Netflix and whatever publicity gets generated by online reviews. This is exactly the kind of show to try stuff out on.

So what the hell is Bojack? It's a reasonable half hour drama that's put on comedy clothes and shoehorned in one-liners as often as it can so that it can be marketed as a comedy. But good comedy doesn't come from someone running through the script trying to punch it up by twisted every third line into something that resembles a joke. It's like, they know how jokes are structured with setup and punchline, and you as the audience can feel all the laugh points and beats, it's just there's no heart (funny, considering that's what the show is about).

Good comedy is about characters being themselves and ending up in uncomfortable places. It's about characters saying something because that's what they'd say here and having it go horribly wrong. Or it's about surprise, about the unexpected. Or maybe it's a bunch of other things, I'm no comedy theorist. But even I know it's not "zingers", fresh off the assembly line.

Oddly enough, Bojack gets one particular kind of comedy dead on: the world building stuff. The small details. Like, whenever there's an establishing shot, there's some kind of anthropomorphic animals in the foreground doing something that animal would do but that it's funny for that animal to do as a person. So... pigeons flying above the capital building... in business suits. Or raccoons scavenging in a dumpster. Or the sheep trimming hedges who then takes a bite of the hedges. None of those things are laugh out loud funny, but they're nice little comedic moments in what would otherwise be a plain establishing shot.

Other details: Princess is an anthropomorphic cat, so when she goes to the gym and runs on a treadmill, she hangs a little catnip mouse in front of her while she runs. Again, not particularly funny, but nice. Or the publishing company working with Bojack on his book is Penguin Books, and everyone who works there is a penguin.

Meanwhile, the latter half of the season has three or four of these dramatic moments that really floored me. They're really great, and they wouldn't be possible without the freedom to really base the show on long term story. Seriously, how is this not more common in comedies? Obviously The Office and Parks n Rec have been getting great long term moments out of their writing, and it's not like every show automatically reboots itself at the end of every episode anymore. But I haven't seen a comedy where I feel like every episode a viewer might be lost without having seen the previous stuff. All hail Netflix!

So what the hell is Bojack? I know I just asked that, but I still don't know. It's an adult animated comedy trying to go deeper and reach some dramatic moments. It succeeds in so many aspects - world building, character arcs, those dramatic moments - but fails in the most important: being funny. And that's too bad, because if this show was funny, it'd be one to come back to again and again.

Inside Llewyn Davis

This movie punches me in the emotional gut. It knocks me down, out cold.

Why is that?

I’ve seen Inside Llewyn Davis twice now. The first time I loved it, but in a sort of subtle way, muted somehow. I spent two hours after the movie feeling beaten down, broken somehow, but in a good way. Like muscles after a long run. As I sat with it over the coming weeks, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was a melody stuck in my head, metaphorically and literally as I purchased the incredible soundtrack and couldn’t stop playing it on loop. The more that melody ran through my head, the stronger I felt, the more devastated I became. It had poisoned me like a nasty bite that left an unremovable and slowly spreading depression through the rest of me.

The second time out it didn’t hit me as hard as the first time. I spent more time concentrating on the technique – editing, music, cinematography. It helped that I went with a friend who didn’t appreciate it as much as I did, so the mood was more analytical. And yet the aftermath was even worse than the first time. I couldn’t do anything with myself but go home and go to bed.

A day later I saw that friend commenting online, wanting to hear what others opinions on how the movie work so well for others. She wanted to be convinced. Technically she was asking someone else for their opinion, but I’m not going to NOT flippantly throw my own opinion into the ring, so I set to writing. Quickly I realized I still didn’t have an answer for her. What in the hell is it about Inside Llewyn Davis that makes me broken when I think about it?

Inside Llewyn Davis is a movie about an asshole who is also an amazing musician, but because of his circumstances, he never makes it. Okay. Why doesn’t he make it?

If you ask him (at least at the start), it’s mostly other people. There’s no money here, right? The wrong people saw him at the Gaslight. His partner happened to be depressed, which wasn’t his partner’s fault, but still. Or maybe if Llewyn’s manager wasn’t a lying jerk, was someone who actually cared about his music…

There’s also an element of bad luck to it, which is a little frightening. It’s a long way to get your one shot, it takes a lot of work, it’s really hard to get there. And once you’re there, even if you’re great, you can still fall back down. That’s a tough reality.

But it’s worse than that, because Llewyn doesn’t get just one shot. He plays the Gaslight every month, and he never gets recognized. He plays the same night as Dylan, and while Dylan gets to go be Dylan, Llewyn gets beat up in an alley. And I’m sure outside the immediate story told, there have been other chances, or at least flickers of them.

Backing up further, there’s obviously an element of self sabotage to Llewyn’s fate. If he wasn’t such an asshole most of the time, maybe people would like him enough to give him a chance. If he didn’t get Jean pregnant, maybe he could’ve actually gotten royalties from Please, Mr. Kennedy. Or maybe if he just picked a manager who didn’t lie to him, he’d have a better idea where he stood. Maybe the way other people treat him is as a result of his own actions. Shocker!

Maybe he’s just needed to grow up a little before he has a real shot of making it. Who knows how long he’s been couch surfing - why hasn’t he found a way to make money? His blind faith in his identity as a folk singer is problematic for actually living his life. In a sense, giving up or at least compromising with that identity is what the movie is about.

So that’s the question - if you’re really a great artist, if you really want to do this thing, how much are you willing to compromise? Compromise who you are as person, even if you’re an asshole. Compromise the integrity of your art by playing novelty songs just so you can pay the bills. Compromise the integrity of your relationship by sleeping with a sleazy bar owner so the friend you’ve hurt can get another chance. Compromise your identity as an artist and get a job at a bar or move to the suburbs because what the hell else do you think you’re doing?

And in fact, Llewyn gets multiple chances to make that compromise. Grossman offers him the chance to shave that goatee and join a trio. If he wasn’t such a fuckup, he'd have royalties on Please, Mr. Kennedy. Other chances would come along - maybe Jim’s about to hit it big, and he’s clearly on call as a session musician for Jim. But that wouldn’t be good enough for Llewyn. As we see in Grossman’s office, it’s not about being any musician, it’s about his own art.

The movie’s point is that in the end, you’re going to have to compromise. Maybe you’re going to end up teaching instead of making, and all that grading will cut into your theorizing. Maybe you’re going to spend all your time practicing your technique without actually producing anything you’re proud of. And if you compromise too much, maybe you’re going to end up stuck doing something for the rest of your life that you never wanted or intended to do for very long.

That’s what destroys me when I look Inside Llewyn Davis, that fear of “just existing” is a fire in my heart I didn’t know was there. And when I look at myself, I’m terrified, absolutely terrified, that what I see is someone who’s going to end up there, who’s going to be willing to compromise away all his art for one reason or another. Maybe for family, maybe for money, maybe for sickness, maybe for death. And man, I wouldn’t mind the hangin, but the lyin in the grave…

And obviously Llewyn is the extreme end of being unwilling to compromise, scornful of those who do. I am not so much. And I'm not nearly as much of an asshole. But I still worry that other people hate me or judge me. And I worry that I am the kind of person who will just move to the suburbs and live out the rest of my life just existing.

I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be there. But I can already feel myself falling.

And this movie burns that nerve.

---

I’m in love with that opening cat sequence. First there’s how human it shows Llewyn. It’s so easy to empathize with that mundane annoyance bordering on anguish that comes with that cat, to the point that I think this sequence is the only reason I’m willing to identify with Llewyn at all through how big of an ass he is. It’s this minor inconvenience with grave consequences for him, for his friends, for this poor lost little kitty. Arguably it’s all his fault, arguably it’s just dumb luck, but here he is with this cat, doing the best he can even if that’s not very good.

But there’s something about that cat combined with the beautiful, sad song that hits home on an even deeper level, past the insecurities about my life and identity as an artist. The moment we spend as the cat, watching the subway stops fly by, and the moment we spend watching that cat while Llewyn is distracted by commuters and the commuters by him… it’s a private moment where I’m reminded what it’s like to be alive in a world rushing by so quickly, so much faster than I can track it. I’m lost, but it’s beautiful. I’m confused, but it doesn’t matter.

In that moment, I want to try as hard as I possibly can doing whatever it is that I’m here for. I want to explore, discover, make sense of the world. I want to express myself! I want to go make something! I want to run away from here and see where I end up.

And for a moment, with a leap out of Llewyn’s arms, that just what I do.

Person of Interest: A History, Recommendation, and Conversation

Entering its third season, Person of Interest has a lot going on. I really want to talk about this week’s episode in particular (season 3 episode 2), but there’s so much to unpack before we get there. Enough so that I’m not quite sure where to start. Maybe the premise? Maybe I’ll assume you don’t know what the heck this show is and we can take it from there. Sound good?

Person of Interest is a show in which Ben from LOST tells Jesus who to kill, and then Jesus kills them.

Wait. No. Scratch that.

Person of Interest is basically a procedural, but with a unique twist. It’s got a kind of “magical realism” thing going on, except instead of magical it’s sci-fi. Close to reality sci-fi, yes? There’s gotta be a word for that. Anyway, in this procedural, each episode our heroes are given a social security number. The person this number corresponds to is going to be involved in a violent crime sometime soon, but we don’t know whether they’ll be a victim or a perpetrator. So our guys investigate to find out, and then help whoever the good guys are.

Our cast: Michael Emerson (who played Ben on LOST) is the computer hacker / tech guy with a cane. Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ) is the ex-spy, total badass action hero. They’re by far the two most important people here, but they’re not the only ones. We started in the pilot with a corrupt cop who they blackmailed into helping, and soon after a legit cop also joined the team. These days there’s another badass ex-spy regular and a few other randos, but that’s the core group.

I started watching Person of Interest about halfway through the first season at the recommendation of a friend who included a “no, really, keep watching for a while” disclaimer with his tentative praise. His belief, which I have come to absolutely agree with, is that the show is mediocre at best and so bad it’s funny at worst when you look at the details of the thing. But on a macro level, the season long plot arcs and in particular the villain’s gallery on this show is pretty incredible. Like Fringe, there’s a really great mythology being built up here. Unlike Fringe, the mythology here is mostly being built up by the characters and events shown on screen instead of already existing and being uncovered through investigation. Whether that’s better or worse I’ll leave for you to decide, but the end result is pretty similar: friggin cool sci-fi ideas and very entertaining bad guys.

Backing up for a second, I should note that this show very much did take a while to get going. It wasn’t until the very last scene of episode 4 that I really saw potential in the show, that it really had a moment of what I consider to be greatness. Before that it was all… well, let’s look at two choice moments from this week’s episode:

(1) The episode ends with the line “I fear that whatever his organization’s ultimate goals may be, this could be just the beginning.”

(2) One of our heroes talks down a murderous gunman out for revenge for his daughter: “Is this how she would want you to honor her memory?”

Those are merely cliches, but I promise you there’s worse dialogue that is outright bad, too. It’s just that the show trained me to stop listening to it a while ago, and I mostly tune it out these days.

Back to the first season: the other moment that made me sit up and take note of the show was episode 7. The team is given the number of a high school teacher living in a bodega down by the docks, and our ex-spy hero has to escort the guy through an emerging gang war ignited by a mysterious figure named Elias. The high school teacher shows up, and it’s Veronica Mars’s dad. “Nooo!” I thought to myself, “Mr. Mars! You’re such a good actor. Can’t you do better than bit parts in mediocre shows?” But aha! At the end of the episode when Mr. Mars is revealed to be Elias, I felt silly and stupid for not catching such an obvious twist earlier. I even called out the superior quality of this week’s guest victim. How could I be so blind? But it’s precisely because the show is so unimpressive on the micro level that Person of Interest has pulled this same trick on me more than once now.

Indeed, it’s not just their supporting cast that knows how to act. Both Ben Linus and Jesus are great, as is basically every other continuing cast member. In an earlier draft of this I started to name names, but I ended up listing every person who’s been in more than one episode. Special shout out to Amy Acker for being especially top notch as always, but seriously. How can a show with such mediocre dialogue have such a great cast? My friend has a theory that the crappy writing is actually a ploy specifically so that savvy people like us lower our standards, making obvious twists like the Mr. Mars one work better.

Anyway, as the first season progressed, more and more villains started popping up. It was a wonder to me that they were able to work them all in - corrupt cops, CIA agents, competing gangs, and the big mystery: how exactly are we getting these numbers? All these things developed through season 1, and many of them even started getting resolved. Elias was put in jail before the season finale despite being the big bad for a substantial part of the season, a bunch of corrupt cops got busted, and evil CIA agents were shot and killed all to make room for the even large pool of baddies introduced in season 2.

As it turns out, the biggest bads in the world of Person of Interest are mysterious rich people hiding behind corporations, shell companies, and fake identities. Information is the real currency of the world, and whoever has it has the real power. This makes sense, because as all these bad guys played by good actors were introduced, we were slowly learning more about the sci-fi part of the world: in a past life, Ben Linus built a machine (referred to as THE machine) for the US government that could process all the data that the Patriot Act and ever-more-pervasive cameras were giving the government access to. Through aggregating that data, it was possible to find terrorists. Obviously such a thing needed to be kept under wraps lest the public outcry destroy all faith in the FBI, CIA, and NSA going forward, and as such the fact that the machine was also detecting more mundane crimes was deemed just that: a side effect. It was too costly, too dangerous to try and prevent these “irrelevant” violent events from occurring, and so they were discarded… that is, until Ben Linus grew a conscience, faked his death, and got Jesus to start helping him. ORIGIN STORY ACTIVATED.

So as season 1 comes to a close, Person of Interest did its most interesting thing yet: it made The Machine into a real character. It’s obvious when you think about it, but again because this show has trained me not to think too hard about it even when I should be, I didn’t see it: The Machine is really an AI, and as a super powerful AI, it was inevitably going to grow and change, adapt and evolve. Serious shit went down, and we ended up with people talking directly to The Machine by standing in Times Square, staring into cameras, and demanding help. Hilarious, brilliant, and perfectly within the world of the show. What a development. It kept the show fresh.

But let’s backtrack again, back to that joke I made a couple paragraphs before about how obviously The Machine needed to be kept a secret lest public outcry bring downfall to the government. Because as we in 2013 now know, PRISM was a thing that happened, and for the most part no one gave a shit. That in itself is terrifying, but like most political issues of the day, I try and repress those thoughts so I don’t end up in politics with a life of hating myself. The more fun to think about is “how does that affect the world of Person of Interest?” It’s supposedly the modern day, so all that stuff still happened. How does the show react? There were a couple interviews with series creator Jonathan Nolan and executive producer Greg Plageman running around after the NSA / PRISM story broke. My favorite is this one from Time Entertainment which says, quote, “[The public’s] indifference about computers having our data puzzles Plageman, who imagines, in his show, much greater public outcry should the existence of the Machine ever be revealed.” and “‘We’re trying to keep the show five minutes in the future but it got out in front of us a little bit,’ says Plageman. ‘It would be interesting if there were ever any organized resistance.’” These guys clearly did their research and knew what was up with our government, or at least what the book writers who were actually paying attention to this stuff thought was up. But the question remains: what now for Person of Interest?

And with all that, we can finally get to this week.

After a lackluster premiere, PoI comes back this week with an episode that started pretty mediocre. I’ll be honest, after the summer my TV habits have adapted Netflix in a way they never had before, and I was questioning whether I’d even keep up with PoI this year if it was just going to be mediocre. I need new surprises, and the first episode and a half hadn’t really delivered any. I’m watching along, and I’m liking what they’re doing with this Life Trace software that can aggregate anyone’s personal data that’s living around on the internet. It’s a much more innocent way to show what the NSA is capable of with all this knowledge in its hands. We just bring it all down to the person-to-person level and scare people that way!

At its heart, I believe this show really is anti-The machine, if that makes sense. Despite our heroes using this near godlike knowledge gained through constant surveillance for good, much of the show is based on the fact that our heroes have to remain hidden from all the people who would use that knowledge for evil: including the governments of the world. It’s really a show about having a conversation about surveillance. How much is okay? What are ethical and unethical ways to use it? How much should we be worried about it? And most importantly, HEY YOU - VIEWER - YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF THIS STUFF, WHATEVER YOUR OPINION IS.

Anyway, I’m watching this episode. Oh hey, that one silent executive for this company that might license Life Track is pretty good. He hasn’t spoken yet, but I can tell just from that reaction shot of him that he’s got something going on. I bet I see him get a real part on some TV show soon. Oh wait, they gave him lines. I guess that’s cool. Now it’s the end of the episode, and he’s still around and talking! Sweet, way to be a good actor. OH SHIT, he’s a new bad guy? Why can’t I ever see these things coming on this show?

This new baddie - or rather group of baddies, as this guy is just a front for a larger group of people - is a very interesting addition to PoI’s overall conversation. This guy represents people who want to maintain their anonymity. In the speech he gives after he’s shot everyone at the end of the episode, I got the same feeling that I got after watching The Dark Knight Rises and listening to Bane: I kinda dig what this guy is saying. So why is this guy the bad guy? But of course, good guys don’t run around and shoot people to make examples of them or hold all of Gotham captive for months at a time to make some sort of vague political statement. There’s gotta be more to it to that, right?

So here’s where we stand: we’ve got a mysterious group of baddies who want privacy to remain a thing in the world, and are willing to kill to send their message. They’re powerful and they’re badass. Then we’ve got the government, who is spying invasively on every person in the country (maybe even world) and selectively using that information to stop terrorists - but at what cooost? And are they really doing as much as they should be? That’s one conversation.

Then there’s crime lord Elias, back on the streets, because what’s better: capital-O Organized crime with an evil man in charge or rampant chaos (see also: breaking bad and the end of season 4)? Don’t forget our corrupt cops and mayor: are the real villains the Elias’s of the world of the politicians just out for whatever scrap of power they can take?

Add a dash of sweet sci-fi: insane rogue hacker Root (Amy Acker) accounts for the human side of this, but The Machine is still evolving, too…

In the midst of all this stands our heroes, trying to navigate this crazy world they exist in, answer some of these questions, and save as many innocent lives as they can along the way. They’re using the pervasive information network available to them for good, because that’s what’s right. But would it be better to shut down the machine entirely? Or would that be equivalent to murder now that it’s… alive?

Who are the bad guys in this brave new world of near limitless information? Who should we trust with our private lives?

Think about those questions, because they’re important. Take a step back from this fun-and-games TV article for a moment, because these questions really, truly, they are important. However good the writing is week to week, PoI succeeds as a show because it makes you think about those questions whether you want to or not. It’s a public service, and I respect that.

Plus, friggin AI.