BoJack says goodbye

Shows like ‘Friends’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’ have coughed up multiple seasons even after writers go dry on ideas. Which is why the cancellation of Netflix’s ‘BoJack Horseman’ hurts: everything, up until the first half of the sixth and last season that dropped last week, has been pure gold.

Set in a universe where humans and anthropomorphic animals co-exist, the show follows the eponymous character, a 90’s sitcom star, who is now a depressed alcoholic, and his friends as they navigate through unhappy, yet oddly farcical, lives.

The show has touched on serious issues in the past.

This season, the characters become aware of ‘Whitewhale Consolidated Interests’, a mega-conglomerate that gobbles anything that stands in the way of its profits. This, the show uses as a springboard for its most profound animal puns yet. This is done through parallels with the other great epic on American capitalism, ‘Moby Dick’. The 19th-century novel had
told the story of one man’s mad, self-destructive chase of a white whale.

And being the anthropomorphic farce that ‘BoJack Horseman’ is, of course, it makes the white whale the hunter. The most direct allusion comes in the form of a journalist who wears an eyepatch (ironically, a ‘wink’ at a sailor’s life) and weirdly, speaks the kind of English you hear in the book. “Call me Isabelle,” she says, echoing the first sentence of ‘Moby Dick’ — “Call me Ishmael.”

This is why ‘BoJack’ should stay on the air. No other show today will think of or have the ambition to crack that joke.