BEST OF 2018 - BOJACK HORSEMAN IS STILL THE BEST SATIRE IN THE WORLD

3.  BOJACK HORSEMAN (NETFLIX)

Bojack has reached a point where it's becoming easy to take its brilliance for granted. To accept its dizzying wordplay as de rigeur. The precise and ruthless vivisections of Hollywoo(d) culture as standard smelling-own-farts metacomedy.  The emotionally raw pits the characters reach as scheduled stops on their seasonal journeys, rather than miracles of real characterization developed without slowing the gag-a-second pace of outlandish puns, visual gags, drug humor, stupid names and honest to god jokes that make it a real contender for funniest show on the air, as well as the saddest, and the most perversely honest.

This season is dipping slightly in the rankings because a spare few elements didn’t entirely work. The pair of vaudevillian popsicle-stick joke writers fell flatter than any gag in the life of the show, and crude (in construction and functionality) sexbot Henry Fondle seemed designed to pogo from abject stupidity to hilariously-inspired stupidity, but spent too much time on the abject end of that spectrum. And let’s be honest, part of the problem with him is that his bits tried to mine the same vein of comic antilogic as the show’s most singularly hilarious creation, and Henry can’t measure up to even two of the children in Vincent Adultman’s oversized trenchcoat, much less the third. What man, or machine, possibly could?

If the sexbot’s rise through the corporate ranks didn’t succeed at bringing the sharpened absurdity that the show had previously trained on abortion or gun control debates to the #MeToo arena, the season did find more productive angles from which to approach the what is certainly the defining issue of the era for the entertainment industry, if not for all of society. Their Mel Gibson analogue tees things off nicely, and dropping in the Forgivies awards as a longstanding staple of Hollywoo is the kind of satire where the matter-of-factness gives it a keener edge.

But it's Bojack’s new gig as the eponymous, gritty antihero Philbert that provides the spine of the season and ties it all together.  It introduces us to great new characters in Stephanie Beatriz’s love interest/costar, a talented performer who has maybe learned her place in the Hollywoo pecking order a little too well, and Rami Malek’s showrunner, so convinced by his own tortured artist schtick that he’s…well, basically what I imagine Nick Pizzolatto is like in person. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Bojack produced the best satire of the antihero-driven prestige drama we’ve seen in the two decades those shows have dominated the airwaves/Emmys. And while I remain a total mark for such offerings (spoiler alert, there's one at the top of this very list), they have certainly developed enough  pretensions and overused tropes to make them ripe for parody. But the thing about Bojack’s send-ups, of not just TV but everything really, is that it is brutal but also understanding. While utter disgust can be good for a couple vicious burns, I don’t think you can do any extended form of satire without a real understanding of the appeal of the thing being satirized.

What elevates Philbert is how it doesn’t just mock  the tropes of an under-parodied genre. It extends that understanding to tie together the entire season’s theme, and present a life-imitates-art feedback loop where men’s bad behind-the-scenes behavior reflects into men’s bad behavior in the scenes which result in an elaborate apologia excusing such bad behavior across the board. It paints an incisive portrait of how personal, artistic, and corporate dysfunction all have a way of developing elaborate ecosystems of justification to sustain themselves, all nesting within and feeding off each other.  But it’s not just moralistic finger-wagging. Bojack isn’t lashing out at another genre, it’s implicating itself along with it (which seems only fair, as I’ve previously written about how favorably that it stacks up against antihero dramas on their own terms). It understands all too well why the entertainments, and justifications, appeal to damaged people and systems.  And in the end, there are still no pat answers about how to balance the need for society to confront patriarchal abuse more forcefully and the moral imperatives to forgive and foster actual growth where it can be found.  

But there are a lot of really, really good jokes.  And why do we even make jokes, if not because they are the next best thing to answers?

Watch It For: "Free Churro" is getting all the attention as the standout episode this year, but for my money, the follow up "INT. SUB", which filter's our usual gang's dysfunction through the unwitting perspectives (and weak attempts at professional confidentiality) of Diane's therapist and her wife, is the best entry.  It works with the visual whimsy that animation provides, where the staginess  of "Churro" works against it.