For the past few years, I’ve been teaching the BoJack Horseman episode “Fish Out of Water” in my writing courses. The episode forgoes dialogue for about 23 of its 26…
Contemporaries Essays
BoJack and #MeToo
For the last three years, I’ve studied masculinity in the context of very public instances of sexual violence, collecting newspaper articles, tweets, documentaries, and books that detail allegations of sexual…
“How do you not be sad?”: Sadness and Communication in BoJack Horseman
Like many recent sadcoms, BoJack Horseman offers viewers a gloss on a hostile affective world in which connections between people are easily shattered.1 BoJack is a horse in pain “all…
Good, Likeable People Who Love Each Other
“Hey, you see those people?” BoJack says to ten-year-old Sarah Lynn at the start of BoJack Horseman’s third episode, looking out at the live studio audience of Horsin’ Around. Sarah…
Introduction: We are all in the gutter
Amid the series of increasingly alarming dumpster fires that define our contemporary moment, BoJack Horseman might seem not quite relevant.1 Sure it’s a hilarious, moving, and original tour-de-force of animation,…
The Traumic: On BoJack Horseman’s “Good Damage”
Lauren Berlant
1957-2021
Undead Language
“How could the person who promises a secret to a ghost still dare say he is a historian?” —Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” On her first work trip to…
Staying Alive
Severance is so fun — and funny — that it’s easy to overlook how much it’s also about sustained, ongoing, and eminently ordinary loss. This fact is surprising given the…
Screen Time, or the Postviral Internet
[P]erhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past. -Bob, in Ling…
Genre Fever
The start of COVID-19 also marked a return to Ling Ma’s 2018 Severance — a historical novel set in the recent past, in which a deadly virus originating from China…