About half a decade ago, people kept telling me to watch BoJack Horseman. Oh, I think you’d really like it, Sam, they’d say, as if I had ever liked anything even once in my life. It’s about a cartoon horse, they’d say—but get this, the horse has mental health problems.
This did not fill me with anticipation. But because I am immaculately generous and open-minded and always willing to give even the worst of my enemies a chance, I sat down and watched BoJack Horseman. Each episode consisted of about twenty minutes of wacky animal-based comedy, and then five minutes of a giraffe recounting its sexual trauma or a sea otter weeping about the lost dreams of youth. Apparently, this made people feel seen: here was a TV show that spoke to the real and complicated feelings that surround our everyday lives, that gave those feelings shape. I made it up until the episode in which a woman who is married to a dog tells her dog-husband that she’d always dreamed of having a big book-lined library like in Beauty and the Beast, so her dog-husband has one built for her in their home, but the woman gets upset and says that it was a fantasy that belonged to her alone and the dog had no right to make it real, which is why they have to divorce. As it happens, this was exactly how my last two relationships ended. It was all too raw. It pierced me deep to the heart of my being. I had to stop watching.
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