How to Find Happiness - Bojack Horseman: The Good, The Bad & The Brilliant

What's up, Wisecrack? Welcome to The Good, The Bad and The Brilliant. The show where we break down the TV shows, movies, and video games we're really excited about. This time we will talk about the last season of BoJack Horseman. This season gives us answers to big questions like: Will Dad's birthday be a success? Will Diane ever become the writer she wants to be? And will BoJack be okay? I'm Michael and today I'm joined by entertainer and comedian Sean Godsey. Hello everyone. Now before we get into the details, let's spoil the entire final season of BoJack Horseman and the series as a whole.

So if you haven't watched the show yet, maybe take a break, binge, and come back. I promise it will make a lot more sense. But now that we've got that sorted, we can get started. We know where we have to start. You're the guest of honor so you can get it going. We have to talk about what is

good

. So Sean, what do you think is

good

about the final season of BoJack Horseman? I would say Diane's character. Diane isn't normally one of my favorite main characters, but this season I really thought she was great. I thought she was very relatable.

I don't know, her story seemed very real. That she is a writer who doesn't know how to write and that she

find

s

happiness

writing this children's book. Which goes completely against her character. Yes. I think Diane has always been one of my favorite characters. I think they really honored that character in the last season. I think her arc was very interesting and really one of the best redemptive arcs. I think in many ways... Yes, that's true. This is a character who saw herself as sort of an avant-garde writer from Los Angeles. And then fall in love, move to Chicago, then Houston, and end up writing the kind of fiction she never thought she would write.

She

find

s

happiness

there. Maybe this is something we can also get into in the shiny section. There's something really powerful about that idea that sometimes the person we think we want to be may not be the place where we're going to find happiness. Yes. She felt very real. Oh, also a smaller thing. I love that she gained weight, but no one made jokes about it or mentioned it. It seemed like something very real in life, people change all the time. I was very impressed by that little detail. Yes. And even the way they approach her mental health in general.

I thought she was very careful. By careful, I just mean that they weren't reckless, they didn't make it a joke. They also didn't make it so that her life was over or that she couldn't have a relationship. She was still in a romantic relationship. She still did the job. She just had to discover herself. And of course, one of the themes I think about in this final season is that all of our main characters discover something. Taking a big turn or leap in their lives for better or worse. So when the curtain falls, each character has actually made some kind of progress.

We can really see that in this season. And it's good that it's not like those big happy endings where everyone applauds. Everyone's ending, I think, is also a little sad or moody. But it feels real. I mean, listen, it doesn't look like a cartoon. It doesn't look like a cartoon. And I think... and this is to jump to one of the final moments of the final episode. It's BoJack and Diane having a conversation. BoJack says something like, "Life's a bitch and then you die, right?" - "Sometimes. Sometimes life sucks and then you keep living." I love that line.

And for me that's one of the main themes of the show. That sometimes things suck really bad and life is really hard and it could be career issues, relationship issues, or mental health issues. But you take it step by step. I don't want this to sound too much like self-help. But I thought it was a really good take. But the whole show is pretty self-help. I mean, the whole show is about depression and addiction... Well it's a show that if they were human, they would like live action and not cartoons. It wouldn't be a comedy. It would be like a really dark show.

I agree I mean, if you imagine some of the things BoJack goes through. It's like Leonardo DiCaprio getting shitfaced, driving, breaking into a house, and almost drowning in a pool. Which maybe happened. I've heard stories and I don't want to go into them because of the defamation law. I'll get into it. Well, one of the things that I think caught my attention is one of the big questions and themes of this season. I thought this was really good, the question is is redemption possible? Is it possible for someone, who by all indications did some really shitty things and hurt a lot of people, to find redemption?

And besides that, what are the limits of justice? Because I think, for lack of a better term, we could say that this is the season where we get BoJack's story like me too. If that's true. He is publicly criticized both for his involvement in Sarah Lynn's death and for taking advantage of several women in his life. They denounce it on national television. He has that kind of reporter that goes with the wind. "If we turn our perspective to demonstrate a broader pattern, we can paint a clearer portrait of a problematic person for a page one profile that will pave our way to a Pulitzer." It's very stupid and fun to have these reporters from the 1920s or something.

Yes. To constantly follow this as a very serious thing... it's funny to have these reporters from the 20s doing a story like me too. It's like a weird juxtaposition that like... I don't know, I guess he added levity to this as something horrible. Sure, and it was an absurd way... and I think you phrased it perfectly, to add levity to it. I think the show did something really interesting. Because we have the only episode in which BoJack does a television interview. He pretty much confesses and everyone loves him for it. He goes to the cafeteria the next day and they tell him, "This is my responsibility because my manager said he saw that and went straight to AA." We see this narrative in that episode where, "Great, you confess to the shitty things you did.

Everyone loves you for it. You can move on." BoJack is on cloud nine. He's so excited that he says, "Let's do another interview." In that, a few more things come to light. Especially this idea that he left Sarah Lynn dying and waited to call the paramedics and call the police. “I keep thinking about those seventeen minutes. You waiting in the parking lot, after she died... but she actually wasn't dead yet. She died in the hospital.” - “True, but at that moment I-I-I-I didn't-’” - “Did you ever wonder what would have happened if you hadn't taken those seventeen minutes?” And there we really have a real reckoning with the shit he did.

There he is finally ostracized by the Hollywoo community. I think he's a little more honest and accurate than a guy who behaves like shit for his entire career, he gives an honest interview and now it's like a free Starbucks for the rest of your life. I think that was great. I think overall it was cool to see a cartoon show where... I generally feel like in a lot of animated comedies it's like people do horrible things, but it's fun. Or like Peter Griffin kills someone as a joke, but then it's funny. Listen... or not, but... No, it's funny when cartoons kill people.

I don't know if it was trying to be a cartoon comment. But it felt like... because cartoons will go very far and be very extreme. Especially in adult animated comedy cartoons. It was cool to see a cartoon that said, "Wow, wow. Like you did all this shit. You're a terrible person." Well, and I think what's important too is that he avoided this easy dichotomy between people are good and people are bad. Almost no one on this show is totally good or totally bad. "I wanted to officially welcome you to the MBN family on Thursday night." - "Thank you." - “And ask yourself if it wouldn't be too much trouble for you to yell at the birthday boy during your interview.” - "Because I-?" - “But only if the interview goes well.

If the interview goes badly, don't bring up dad's birthday.” I think especially the way they handled the addiction was very real. Because we see in BoJack's life that he is part of a cycle of addiction. He was raised by shitty parents who were also alcoholics. Against his best efforts... and we see some flashbacks to the years when he started drinking in this final season, which I think is instructive. Despite his best efforts, he keeps getting dragged into it. So I think they handle it in an excellent way. Because the point isn't, "Oh, he's an alcoholic, so he's fine.

It's not his fault." But the point is also not that he is completely responsible in a way that his addictions don't influence it. It's about the messiness of these things. And avoid giving simple conclusions. It's great that he's in this cycle, which is very real and it's not like getting sober is the end for an addict. Yeah. You know, this is also the season where something made me understand in terms of why these characters need to be animals, because I think it really got to the point that as humans, we are animals. We forget about that, and I think, in the show, why does BoJack keep coming back to this stuff?

Animal instinct. The inability of him, although he knows what he should do, sometimes he cannot do it. The same goes for a character like Diane. She knows what she has to do, but sometimes she just can't do it, because we're stuck in this weird space as humans where we're rational, we're smart, we can think all these great things, but we're still an animal. We still have those basic instincts, and I think that show addresses that tension very well. Even if you know your problem... you'll probably still do it. Yes. It's fun to do bad things. And it's good.

It's good. Do bad things. So, to change things up a bit, I think there was a lot that had to do with the convergence of media and capitalism. We see about dad's birthday. IP that came from a card. Having the idea that so many things that are manufactured are nothing. It's just a shitty idea that we turn into something because we think it's going to make money. We have the White Whale company that Diane invested in. I love it. Yeah. I think that's like a substitute for Amazon and Jeff Bezos, and this idea that these big companies own these little things that we think are pure and interesting, and the way we look at people who changed their art or did it.

What they do because of the interest of this company. And there's a question: At one of the White Whale meetings, Diane basically asks, "What's the difference between capitalism and evil?" "The white whale is not evil, they are just capitalists." - "What is the difference!?" And they get to this moral question of how this economic structure is shaping so many things in their world, and these are real things. It's like, "Come to Hollywood, kid, you'll see." "He bought a telephone company, a sports team, and when he didn't like the way the newspapers talked about him, he bought his own newspaper!" There are moments where he portrays Hollywood as a good or fun place to be, but mostly he's pretty cynical about Hollywood, which is a lot of fun.

And again, I think it's funny that Diane's happy ending is to leave that, leave Hollywood and live in Houston. I want us to talk at length about the penultimate episode, but I think we should leave it for the bright part. Before we wrap up our good section, anything else you wanted to touch on that you noticed while watching? Things that excited you? Things that really caught your attention? Well, listen, I'm an entertainer. Drawing. Throughout the series, I think it's only gotten better, especially in the later seasons. The character design is great. It's such a colorful world.

I love BoJack Horseman's style and...this is a very specific note, but his clothes. They have real clothes that people would wear, that you could probably order from a catalog. In a lot of cartoons, it's like you draw a line on someone's neck and that's their shirt. Rick and Morty do that. A lot of cartoons do that, but everyone in BoJack wears real clothes and they have jackets and buttons and, I don't know, I've never seen a cartoon that paid so much attention to clothes. That's why we needed an animator for this. We wouldn't have made it.

Yes, I knew those clothes. This is like inside the animator's studio. Okay, now that we've talked about all the things we thought were good about the final season of BoJack, which was a lot, we need to also talk about what didn't work. What would you say was bad about the final season of BoJack Horseman? Todd's mom. You were very quick with that. Yes. Todd's mom. That was a terrible story. I don't understand. That's not a real problem, that Todd helped his mom so now she's not coming down to dinner. "She didn't come to dinner because she...she's embarrassed." - “Can't she say hello? “The woman has my kidney.” -“And that is why she is ashamed.

A mother should not owe her life to her child.” Every time they made Todd dramatic, I didn't like it. He is a silly character. I get that BoJack is very dramatic and really gets into real trouble, but I don't know, let Todd be funny or let him be dumb. I don't know. I hated that. Yes, especially since some good things happened to Todd this season. He finally hadis where we talk about the big ideas that really grabbed us this season. So what did you think was worthy of being called

brilliant

about the final season of BoJack Horseman?

So what I really loved was the episode where Diane was trying to write her book. I loved seeing her internal thought process with that. It was really interesting. That's another

brilliant

thing that BoJack does in general, is that they will use alternative animation styles within the show. And this is where she has a depressive episode while trying to work and the animations show us this? Yes, it's sketchy and has a simple background and I loved that. I loved that the message was that your damage doesn't have to lead to anything. It could just be damage.Yes.

Because there's that question, right? Does all art have to come from a place of harm? Did you have to be someone who's been through trauma to create good art? And I think it gets at that in a really interesting way. And I like that Diane is so tormented throughout the entire series and that she ends up writing a fun children's book, but that brings her happiness. I love that. Well, I guess it gets to the simplicity of happiness, right? I often think that you can think that happiness has to be that big emotional moment, or winning the big race, or marrying Brad Pitt, or whatever.

Or writing. Yeah. Writing her really deep novel about how terrible everything is. Yes. And I think this shows that it's okay to find happiness in something that seems a little more practical, a little more every day. You can move to Chicago with your boyfriend and eat Chicago-style food. They really got into the Chicago jokes this season. I thought it was funny. It's funny that he's a bull. Yes. Yes. Because the Chicago Bulls are a sports team... in Chicago. That's how it is. Oh, I thought it was a great look at the creative process and she kept writing stuff and it was shit.

Or the characters in her head would ask her, "Is this something? Is this something?" It felt very real that if you were writing or creating something, you felt, "Oh, yeah. That's what you go through." You constantly say, "I don't know. Maybe." Brilliant. Yeah. And I definitely think the fusion of seeing someone deal with some mental health issues and also the creative process. And I think for a lot of people those two things can go hand in hand. And I imagine a lot of creative people can see that and find some solace. I love the line where Guy says, “I need to go to a dark place and I can't get there.

When I'm with you, when we go out, I feel good. I feel happy, but the moment I sit down to write…” - “Hey, you were having trouble writing this book when you were depressed, and you're having trouble now that you're not depressed. I liked that the story wasn't like, yeah, she took medication and it blocked her creativity and that she even thought that and then she was wrong. I think that's great. I think it's a great message. I loved it. Yes. That was an episode that you thought was brilliant. I actually found the penultimate episode where BoJack is, shall we say, dying?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I thought that was amazing. That was great. I mean, I thought it was an interesting meditation on the meaning of death. And I think we had two shows, we had their final seasons around the same time, BoJack Horseman and Good Place, both ended with this question of what does death mean? I mean I liked reading BoJack Horseman better. Now, in this episode, we have these kinds of neurons slowly firing as he chokes to death. We see all these important people in his life who also died and died in many cases because, not of him directly, but of situations, as if he was involved.

Yes. And there is this door. They're doing a talent show, Zach Braff is there on skates, and they all perform and walk through the door, and BoJack keeps asking, "What's on the other side, what's on the other side? And finally, Herb says to him, " Oh Bojack, no. There is no other side. "And it gets to this idea that, I don't know... I mean, really, the show is saying there's no heaven. Yeah. The shows make such a bold statement: there's no heaven. There's no hell. When you die, you die. I thought it was cool to just pick a side.

Which reminds me... Can I? Can you get a little nerdy for a second? Please. Thank you. But it reminds me of something Nietzsche talks about. One of his problems with religion is that if people get so obsessed with heaven and what happens after they die, they don't give a shit about their life now. They don't care about his relationships, his passions, all that kind of stuff and that bothers him. Nietzsche's criticism of religion is not some petty, angry 17-year-old's stuff. . It is a criticism of people who do not care or value their own lives. And I think what we get from this particular interpretation of death is that BoJack can't find redemption in death.

He can't fix it by dying and going to heaven where everything will be okay. If he wants to find redemption, he has to do it himself and he has to do the really hard, slow work. And I think, in this season as a whole, BoJack just wants to be okay. He wants to snap his fingers to apologize once, and for years of bad behavior and years of being a screwed up guy... sweep it under the rug. And I think when we found out that, spoiler alert, he didn't die. He is alive. He now knows that he has to work hard to improve.

Visually it was great. Once a season they always do this kind of mind-blowing episode, which is always great. And this episode specifically was visually stunning. I loved it when the black substance chased him. He was running on the table and a black goo was chasing him. Yes. It's like pure black nothingness, annihilating everything. It's visually very good and very interesting, and a departure from the rest of the series. Yes. And to me, that ties into something that I think we also talked about a little bit earlier, which is this overarching question of the show: Are some people just good and some people just bad?

And some people are just brilliant? But are people good or bad? And I think the show captures the idea that it's neither, that what we do shapes us. This is something, I'm going to put my nerd hat on for two more seconds. People like Aristotle and David Hume have always put forward the idea that morally we are simply a collection of habits. And if we do good things, we become good people with good character. If we do bad things, we become bad people. It's not that a truly evil person was born evil, and a truly great person was simply born great.

I think we see that in the show, that BoJack is someone who learns that lesson, that if he wants to get better, he has to work to get better. And he was bad, he did terrible things. But he's still the main character and you still want him to be okay even though he maybe killed his former co-star and hurt all these people. I still found myself wishing he didn't die in that episode. And I think this show has been compared to Mad Men and Breaking Bad in terms of having antiheroes as protagonists. I think this show did a better job than Mad Men or Breaking Bad of creating a shallow character, a bad guy, but one we still sympathize with.

That we still want something good because we see, we learned a lot about his backstory and we see so much pain that's behind all of this that we can sympathize and want the best for this character, while still loving him. Take into account the consequences of his actions. Yes, you want him to take a fall, but you also always see that he doesn't like himself either. It's not like he did that to Sarah Lynn or Hollyhock and then said, "Yeah, fuck you." Know? He's always like, "Oh, what am I doing? I don't want to go to prison, blah, blah, blah." Yeah.

I mean, he knows he's a piece of shit. Yeah. I mean, he understands that and I think we see him spiraling because of that awareness. And then when we see him do good things, we see him slowly recover. I mean he's sad and maybe one day he'll go back there, even if he does it in prison, when he goes and becomes a theater professor at that university. I think we see this that by doing little good things for people, that's good and it makes them feel good and he sees that. I think it's touching that in prison he can still do that.

Yes, it felt good that he continued teaching acting even though he was in prison: “Schlesinger, if you have time to make a knife and stage a jump on the rats in Block C, you have time to learn your lines. 'Good? Priorities”. Well, Sean, we've been through a lot. We have talked about what is good, what is bad and what is brilliant. We have done the lightning round. The last thing we need to do is take all the complex words we've used, all the wonderful ideas we've explored, throw them out the window, and reduce this whole spectacle to a five-point number system.

Wow. But what we need to do here is determine what our arbiter of value will be. Then we have to determine what we are going to have five units of. When you think about things on the show, I mean it could be like five bottles of alcohol or pills, that's a little dark... A little dark. What do you think? It could be five Hollywood D's. Five Hollywood D's, that's good. Five Hollywoob, Bs. Hollywoob Bs. Five Chicago-style baked potatoes you'd get in a human game. Five unread letters to BoJack. Or unseen, I guess, BoJack read it. Yes, five prison play productions.

But you know what I liked about what you said? I liked the Hollywood DS. It is this that loomed over the entire series. Yes. You never really understand it. So let's use our D system. So a D is that this is garbage, it's like Horsin' Around with all the BoJack removed. Five is as if it were the entire Secretariat. Simply amazing work. Well? So I'm going to leave the responsibility to you. You have to go first. Is this the full show or this season? We will do it this season. Well well. But we can consider it a little bit in the back of your mind because you can't forget it.

So the final season of BoJack Horseman, one to five Hollywood D, what do you get, Sean Godsey? I think BoJack Horseman gets 4.5 Hollywood Ds. Wow. 4.5 Ds. Yes. And since I'm not capable of having an original thought, I'll also give it a 4.5 Hollywood D. I think it was so good. I think there were some low moments. Yes. Todd's mom. Todd's mom, the end. Some things, but definitely 4.5. Overall it was great. I loved it. It's great. I highly recommend it. If people haven't seen it... I don't know why they would still watch this if they haven't seen it.

Yes. Subscribe to Netflix. Yes. Or get a password from someone. Or access or go to the dark web and buy passwords. You can do it. Or connect to the Internet and you can watch illegal streams. Oh yes, yes, yes. Or don't do that. I don't know if I could say that. Oh, and watch illegal streams while committing crimes in real life, so you can watch them on your mobile device while committing crimes. Or you're robbing a bank. Yes. Don't do drugs, go commit crimes. Yes. Impressive. Well, Sean, it's been great having you here. If people want to find you, not in life, on social networks.

I can give my address a phone number. Do not do that. Do not do that. Well. I don't want to have... no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yes. Where could they find you on social media? Find me at @scannedlife on Instagram. Great, and if I'm not mistaken, they could see some of your animation there, right? That's how it is. You can see some of my animation. You can send me a message, I will let you know my address and phone number. Well guys, that was The Good, The Bad & The Brilliant in the latest season of BoJack Horseman.

Thank you very much for staying. Let us know what you think in the comments and let us know any properties you'd love to see us cover on the show in the future. Sean, it's Michael. Thanks for watching. See you next time. Later!