BoJack Horseman lurched out of the gate last year with a whole lotta animal puns and one uncomplicated thesis: Old sitcoms suck. An aggressively stupid and mawkish show from the late '80s called Horsin' Around, about an equine-human hybrid in Cosby sweaters who adopts three adorable orphans, made its star, BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett), incredibly rich and incredibly miserable. Fame is rumored to arrest the development of its beneficiaries at the life stage when they make it big, which suggests that BoJack will never age out of the easy entitlement and existential malaise that have set him early on a path to slow but steady self-ruin.
After indulging its protagonist's asshole behavior for a little too long during the middling first half of the debut season, creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg made his show one of Netflix's sharpest and silliest original series — and one of the best animated programs for adults anywhere — by course-correcting it toward a merciless media satire and a surprisingly affecting doomed romance between BoJack and his autobiography ghostwriter, Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie), an equally lost soul. Diane has since married a dog-man aptly named Mr. Peanutbutter, voiced by Paul F. Tompkins, a happy-go-lucky has-been who used to be BoJack's ratings rival. (The world-building is detailed enough that you get used to the human-animal hookups pretty fast.)
Season 2, available in full as of July 17, has found this gorgeous, absurdist, melancholic, occasionally bawdy show reaching its potential. After the commercial and critical success of his memoir — in which Diane exposes more of her client/friend/would-be lover's secrets than he was comfortable with — BoJack gets to prove himself a real actor by starring in a warts-and-all biopic of his personal hero, Secretariat. (In this version of the sprinting champion, Secretariat throws himself off a bridge when it's discovered that he'd been betting on his own races.) A perfectly structured season-long arc finds BoJack struggling to channel his own sadness on camera while dealing with a too-demanding director (Maria Bamford), as well as the chaos of Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter's fragile marriage, his feline agent Princess Carolyn's (Amy Sedaris) ever disastrous love life, and his unemployed housemate Todd's (Aaron Paul) crazy schemes to finally make something of his life — which is all that BoJack wants, too.
Since the show's best watched serially from the start, here are five reasons to tough out the handful of mediocre episodes at the beginning (if you haven't already done so) to get at what makes BoJack Horseman one of the most distinctive and creatively unflinching experiments on TV.
5. It's one of the most beautiful and ambitious animated shows on the air.
BoJack Horseman looks like few other shows, with its blend of the attractively garish palette of network favorites like The Simpsons and Bob's Burgers and the deliberately awkward lines of the indie-comic world, which tend to accentuate, rather than smooth over, facial features. The two-legged animal characters in people clothes have visual charm to spare, while, more important, the humans somehow don't look bizarre sidling up next to them. Every scene packs in a huge amount of character detail and nested jokes that might require a second viewing to catch — laudable accomplishments from production designer Lisa Hanawalt. Just as noteworthy are the confident strokes of darkness and gloom — it could be argued that BoJack, like Amazon's Transparent, is more a half-hour drama than a comedy — one that arguably hits harder because of the show's sunny look, like sad lyrics sung to a cheery melody.
4. It rewards our love of, and nurses its own affection for, television and celebrity culture.
In the season premiere, Herb Kazzaz (Stanley Tucci), the amiable but practical creator of Horsin' Around, tells BoJack in a flashback, "No one watches this show to feel feelings. Life is depressing enough already." But we see in the very first scene of that same episode how wrong Herb is. While his parents tear each other down, a foal version of BoJack inches closer to the TV set to tune out the screaming from the next room. Horsin' Around may have been a disaster for all involved with the production — the child actors are definitely screwed up forever — but there's still hope that BoJack did some good with his sitcom, even if it wasn't Hamlet, which is the way TV often works, especially for young viewers. BoJack feeds that sitcom nostalgia, albeit with a drop of surreal hilarity, by occasionally re-enacting hacky story lines, like the goofy Todd believing himself to be bad boy Toad in a Steve Urkel/Stefan Urquelle flip, by playing up the ridiculousness of those familiar plots. And the sprawling, A- and B-list cast — which includes Lisa Kudrow, Amy Schumer, Stephen Colbert, Anjelica Huston, Keegan-Michael Key, Patton Oswalt, J.K. Simmons, Alan Arkin as a still-alive J.D. Salinger, and Paul McCartney as himself, among numerous others — makes an irresistible game out of identifying the recognizable voices of the actors and comedians, several of whom play off their personas. This is a show made by pop-culture obsessives for pop-culture obsessives.