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Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

“Now this is television! Turn on the rain!” BoJack Horseman and J. D. Salinger

In Season 2 of BoJack Horseman, Hollywoo agent Princess Carolyn learns that J. D. Salinger is alive, hiding out at Joe Nobody’s Shop for Tandem Bicycles, having faked his own…

Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

It’s Not Ibsen

Back in the 90s, BoJack Horseman was on a very famous TV show. It wasn’t a very good show, but the characters, BoJack tells us, were good people.1 BH: I…

Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

Major Falls and Minor Lifts: The Character System of BoJack Horseman

BoJack Horseman is set in a cartoonish world where hybrid beings satirize familiar behavior and in which backgrounds keep up the visual equivalent of a laugh track. We notice moles…

Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

Only Connecting in Pacific Ocean City

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, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

“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…

Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

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,…

Contemporaries Essays, Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman

Contemporaries Essays, Severance

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…