BoJack Horseman Season 2 Review

Season 2, which releases July 17th, picks up as production begins on BoJack’s comeback vehicle, Secretariat, with BoJack trying to use the project as a springboard to his becoming a better horse/person/horseperson. As part of that process, he starts a long-term relationship with Wanda (Lisa Kudrow), an owl and TV exec who’s just woken up from a 30-year coma. Kudrow’s a fantastic addition to the cast, even beyond the fact that Lisa Kudrow voicing an owl just makes perfect sense. The fourth episode, maybe the best non-drug-trip-related episode BoJack has done yet, involves Wanda telling a pair of shaggy dog jokes to BoJack, and the payoff gets its appropriately wise punch thanks to Kudrow.

The rest of the gang is much the same as we left them last year. Maybe the biggest sign of growth for the show is how often it can now operate independent of BoJack. Todd (Aaron Paul) has so reliably become a facilitator of random hijinks that an entire subplot is spent comparing him to Steve Urkel, but BoJack’s at its best when silliness and character stories strike a balance.

Again, the fourth episode provides a great showcase for BoJack’s split personality. In one plot, Diane (Alison Brie) and Mr. Peanutbutter (a treasure of a character and performance from Paul F. Tompkins) are nervously evaluating how their recent marriage has and hasn’t changed them. In another, Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris) is entertaining her boyfriend, Vincent Adultman, and his son, Kevin, a matter complicated by the fact that Vincent is almost certainly three boys stacked on top of one another in a trench coat, Little Rascals-style.

Between the two stories, you’ve got a perfect example of how Bob-Waksberg’s understanding of TV conventions allows BoJack to expertly ape sitcom structure, while telling messy stories about people who don’t always wind up the same person they were at the start of the episode. Clichés exist for a reason, in TV and life, and much of the dramatic heft of BoJack comes from watching the characters navigate their way between the good ones and the bad.

As comedy, BoJack Horseman’s second season is rarely less than amusing, thanks to its colourful animation, huge stable of celebrity voice cameos, and bizarre taxonomic conceit. There’s really no good reason why the world of BoJack Horseman looks like a zoo, other than because animals are an inexhaustible source of jokes. The only weak episode of the first six sets out to explore some of that world’s internal logic, but even it gets great mileage out of a stupid runner about the various puns a chicken cluck can sound like. Whether providing scene-transitioning sight gags or subtle character commentary, the cross-species playfulness of the show more than justifies the inexplicable premise.

There’s a method to how BoJack Horseman uses its pop culture shorthand that often makes the rest of the humor more than just swings at easy TV targets and ‘90s nostalgia. BoJack Horseman might never be Netflix’s most important show, but in some ways it’s the most telling about the current state of TV. BoJack’s claim to fame, Horsin’ Around, was a riff on early ‘90s sitcoms like Full House, which, as it turns out, Netflix will be reviving. As BoJack Horseman astutely, hysterically reveals, mourning the past is often a lot healthier than trying to live in it.