Relationship Spotlight: BoJack Horseman & Todd Chavez (BoJack Horseman)

BoJack Horseman dropped the first half of its final season last month, which of course got me thinking about BoJack Horseman again (and asexuality in the media – when the show wraps up in January, there will be no confirmed aces on TV anymore.) And while all of BoJack’s major relationships on the show are important in different ways, my sentimental favorite will probably always be BoJack and Todd (a few spoilers.)

Before we get to into it, I have a few things to acknowledge. First, BoJack and Todd’s relationship has changed a lot over the course of the series, and in the most recent season, they spend very little time together, in no small part because BoJack is in the midst of a very personal journey. Second, another reason for the changes in their relationship is their serious baggage. BoJack has done some truly terrible things to Todd, and as happy-go-lucky as Todd often is, that only goes so far, and the series has seen some major riffs between them.

Looking at the series overall, though, there’s a lot to love about BoJack and Todd. In a weird way, they remind me a little bit of Blackadder and Baldrick, with Todd as the everpresent quasi-dogsbody BoJack spends much of his time being annoyed by. We’re introduced to Todd as BoJack’s roommate, although we later find out he actually crashed a party at BoJack’s house once and just never left. He sleeps on BoJack’s couch and is constantly told by BoJack to clean up his shit (seasons later, we discover that BoJack’s house has a second bedroom he never told Todd about.) This places Todd in an odd position in BoJack’s life. He’s constantly in the way and taking up space in a manner that’s purposefully impermanent, with BoJack projecting the notion that he’s way past ready for Todd to get out of his hair, but that’s not the truth of the situation.

In truth, BoJack needs Todd, destructively so (their first major falling-out occurs when Todd learns that BoJack sabotaged a big break for Todd in order to keep Todd dependent on mooching off of BoJack.) Despite all BoJack does to demean Todd and all his weary irritation at Todd’s whacky hijinks, BoJack needs Todd’s chaotic-good friendship in his life. Todd is one of the toughest nuts to crack when it comes to hitting his limit with BoJack – BoJack really has to screw things up before Todd is done with him – but whenever he does reach that point, BoJack suddenly realizes what he stands to lose. BoJack’s apologies to Todd are often dramatic and involve big gestures. Honestly, the beats tend to be similar to big rom-com declarations, albeit with a lot more zaniness. I mean, Lloyd Dobler just held up a boombox. BoJack saves Todd from a cultish improv group at sea!

And in the midst of all the effed-up stuff, there’s just so much fun. I like how BoJack can be begrudgingly cajoled into having a good time with Todd sometimes, and when they really get into the shenanigans, it’s just off the wall. One of my absolute biggest laughs from season 1 comes in the middle of BoJack’s climactic bender, in which he and Todd are so out of it they’re not sure whether they’re holding guns or brooms but decide the only way to figure it out is to see if they can shoot each other. “Let them eat guns!!!”

Asexual Sighting: Yolanda Buenaventura (BoJack Horseman)

This character was actually introduced on BoJack Horseman last year, but I waited until after this season to give her an Asexual Sighting because 1) she’s a minor character and 2) her asexuality is revealed in her final scene in season 4, so I needed the new season to have more to say about her (a few Yolanda-Todd-related spoilers.)

Todd first encounters Yolanda during a particularly-insane season 4 misadventure, his clown dentistry.  Yolanda is sent by the Better Business Bureau to assess his incredibly-dubious business venture and is pretty quickly established as something of an anti-Todd.  While Todd is kooky, imaginative, and optimistic to a fault (and I mean to a fault!), Yolanda is dry, pragmatic, and, of course, business-minded.  However, their association leads to Yolanda getting tangled up in Todd’s whacky adventure, and as their profession relationship concludes, Yolanda suggests pursuing a personal one.  When Todd explains that he’s asexual, Yolanda simply replies, “Yeah, I know, so am I.  That’s why I’m asking you out.”

This is where Yolanda’s purpose in the story comes in.  Less of an actual character, she’s there to be someone who dates Todd as a fellow romantic ace – one who’s clearly not right for him.  She’s a way for the show to demonstrate how tough dating can be for romantic aces, a point it spells out explicitly in the season 5 opener when Todd discusses the value of a potential dating app for asexuals.  He says that, without something like an app to bring different people together, romantic aces may just fall in with whatever romantic aces they come across, even if they’re not romantically compatible, for lack of other options.  And to be sure, the season later explores a will-they won’t-they between him and Emily, his sexual ex that he reconnected with in season 3 and kicked off his coming-out arc.  Those two have the opposite problem as Todd and Yolanda:  while their personalities and interests are fairly compatible, they haven’t figured out how to have a relationship in which both are comfortable and get their needs met.

As such, Yolanda herself winds up being more of a function than a character.  There are some amusing moments with her, like her flat admission that she once met Paul Rudd at a party and “did not find him charming,” and I like that she’s nervous about coming out to her extremely sex-positive family.  But really, the point of her is to be a romantic ace who’s wrong for Todd and possibly pave the way for a future relationship with Emily.  So… underwritten mid-game love interest?  Not the most exciting, and even as relatively-minor characters go, the show has had much better (Judah for the win!)

It doesn’t seem super-likely that we’ll see Yolanda again, and she’s never been more than a minor character.  But I do still appreciate her existence.  BoJack Horseman is the first story I’ve even seen to feature two asexual characters at once, and even if the plotline doesn’t serve her very well, it’s good to show that two people being romantic aces doesn’t automatically make them right for each other.  After all, I’m not about to say no to an explicitly-ace plot involving explicitly-ace characters!

Favorite Characters: BoJack Horseman (BoJack Horseman)

Let’s be honest here:  BoJack can absolutely awful.  He’s done so many terrible things, selfish things that crap on others for no reason and hurt the people he cares about.  Usually, just when things start looking up, he sinks to a low you didn’t know he had.  He’s a complicated chacter with tons of painful baggage, but that doesn’t excuse any of the things he’s done.

And yet.  BoJack captivates me.  I’ve seen all manner of a-hole characters:  entertaining unrepentant ones, annoying unrepentant ones, despicable unrepentant ones, ones who are genuinely trying to change their ways, ones are more complex than they first appear, ones who are draped in woobiness in lieu of actual depth or grow, ones who are their own worst enemies.  I’ve seen all sorts.  But I’ve never seen a character quite like BoJack.

He’s a former sitcom star, obnoxiously rich and once hugely famous.  His star now faded, he lurches between craving the adoration of the masses, proving himself relevant as a real actor, and just wanting to be left out of the Hollywood fishbowl.  He’s both incredibly arrogant and desperately insecure.  When he’s looking for validation, whether it’s from a close friend, a casual acquaintance, or a random passerby, there’s a fine line between wanting to be puffed up and frantically scrabbling for a lifeline, and he nearly always crosses it.  He spends so much time thinking about how he wants others to see him and how to go about accomplishing that, but for every time he follows that path to what he wants, there’s another instance of him torpedoing it all at the last second, and another of his calculated plan driving him straight into disaster.  What’s more, another instance of him achieving what he wants only to find that he still isn’t happy.

BoJack lives with depression but doesn’t seem to have ever sought help for it.  He avoids it with alcohol, drugs, and food.  He tries to cut it off by pursuing this or that goal, all of which he’s determined will finally allow him to be okay with himself.  He gives himself over to it, wallowing in self-disgust or burning bridges because he doesn’t know what else to do or going completely numb, staring into an endless expanse and seeing no hope.  He does, on occasion, reach out to others for a hand, but as with his goals, he pins his rescue so wholly on them that they can never help but disappoint in his eyes.

And so, he gets into enormous fights over pointless things.  He pushes people away.  He sabotages his career.  He hurts his friends.  He runs away.  He makes himself look stupid and petty in his herculean efforts to appear anything but.  He gets jealous.  He hates everything.  He feels crushingly alone.  He drowns his sorrows.  He looks for light and doesn’t find it.  He does terrible, terrible things, again and again, often not realizing just how awful they are until he’s in far too deep to back out.

It’s maybe a weird comparison to make, but I’m reminded of a scene in the first season of Skins where Sid and Michelle visit Cassie in a mental health facility.  As Sid looks dubiously at the activities of the patients around him, Michelle simply says, “They’re trying to be happy, Sid.  It isn’t easy.”  That’s what comes to mind when I see BoJack.  More than fame, more than relationships, more than relevance, BoJack just wants to feel happy.  All those other things are just ways he thinks he can get there, but time and time again, he finds that it’s just so hard.

Some Thoughts on Three Television Stories about Sexual Harassment

I haven’t talked much on the blog about #MeToo or Time’s Up, although it’s an issue I care about and many actresses I admire have been doing brave, excellent work in forcing the conversation on this subject.  And even today, I don’t want to talk specifically about that, but rather several TV episodes that deal with the topic.  I’ve been thinking about this lately, three different episodes dealing with sexual harassment/abuse (two specifically within the entertainment industry) that were all written before the Harvey Weinstein story opened the floodgates.  They weren’t made right on top of one another, but I happened to see all three in moderately-close succession, and as I’ve been following the news the last few months, all three have been on my mind.

The first I want to talk about is an episode of BoJack Horseman.  It’s from season 2, so it actually came out a couple years ago, but since I only got into the show late last spring, it’s still relatively fresh for me.  Next is a season 2 episode of Master of None, which came out over the summer.  And finally, there’s an episode of Big Mouth, whose first season dropped in the fall – I think the show came out slightly after the Weinstein scandal broke, but the episodes obviously would’ve had to have been written before that.  (Side note:  as I write this, it occurs to me that all three shows are Netflix originals.)  Spoilers ahead for “Hank After Dark,” “Buona Notte,” and “The Head Push.”

“Hank After Dark,” the BoJack Horseman story, features Diane speaking up about the rumors on “Uncle Hanky,” a legendary, much-beloved TV personality (shades of Bill Cosby,) and later trying to publish an article with an on-the-record accuser.  Of the three episodes, I think it’s the most true-to-life, especially for a “pre-Weinstein” world (of course, all this stuff was still going on in Hollywood at the time, and had been for decades, but it was still in “whisper network” territory.)  It’s a great, hard-hitting episode about an awful topic, and it’s not afraid of the ugliness of how these things go down.  While the show stays vague on Uncle Hanky’s specific allegations, it’s clear what type of creep he is and that it’s the sort of “open secret” that most people have been ignoring for a long time.  When Diane addresses the rumors, she’s the one who’s attacked, and she finds herself in the middle of a media firestorm full of people demanding to know why she’s determined to destroy a “great guy” like Uncle Hanky.  She’s dragged through the mud, she faces protesters and receives mountains of hate mail (including death threats,) and in the end, after Uncle Hanky himself creepily puts the pressure on, her source backs down and can’t go through with the article.  Uncle Hanky remains “spotless” in the public eye.  It’s a devastating ending, like so many BoJack Horseman episodes have, but until very recently, that’s how must of these stories have gone, and the show is incredibly honest in its depiction of how women have been vilified for accusing men of sexual assault/harassment.

Next is Master of None’s “Buona Notte.”  I’ll start out by saying that I don’t want to get into the stuff about Aziz Ansari, but I will say that, prior to reading that article, I’d already been uncomfortable about the approach this episode takes compared to the other two.  In it, Devin finds out that Chef Jeff, the celebrity chef he’s just partnered with for a new series, has a history of harassing female crew members, including a friend of Dev’s.  With the series about to premiere and ads with his and Jeff’s face on them plastered all over the city, Dev is sitting on this information and not sure what to do with it.  When the news comes out in the middle of a live interview featuring both Jeff and Dev, Dev is caught in the crossfire as someone marketed as the “best bud” of this serial harasser.  So, here we have a story about harassment that, for its time, is pretty unrealistic in the way the accusers are instantly, universally believed and the accused’s career takes a severe, immediate hit.  We’re seeing a lot more support for accusers now and swifter consequences for outed harassers, but when this episode came out, that just wasn’t the world we lived in.  It echoes the sort of disconnect you see between some men in Hollywood worrying about the current “witch hunt” and how careers are being tanked over “touching a girl’s knee,” when it’s clear to anyone who’s paying attention that that’s not what’s going on; it’s that kind of out-of-touch.  What’s more, the main focus of the story is on “poor innocent Dev” getting blowback due to his association with Jeff rather than any of the women who were harassed.  As such, the whole thing has both a fairly idealized outcome with the swift judgment (although it’s framed, not as a good thing, but as a problem for Dev) and kind of a weird “but what about the men who didn’t know only recently knew about it?” air.

Finally, we have Big Mouth with “The Head Push.”  This one is different in that it doesn’t involve the entertainment industry (although the incident does take place at a cast party for a school play) and it involves teens instead of adults.  In the story, Andrew and Missy see Nick’s older sister Leah making out with Daniel, the play’s dreamy lead, in her bedroom.  They’re horrified as Daniel repeatedly tries to push Leah’s head down to give him a blow job, despite her obvious indication that she doesn’t want to do that.  The kids don’t understand exactly what they saw, but they know it’s bad.  However, when they try to tell Nick about it, he brushes it off, unwilling to believe anything unflattering about a cool high schooler like Daniel.  The episode does a good job nailing that kneejerk dismissal, as well as Leah’s feelings of shame and isolation after what happened.  The story ends with Daniel being exposed and everyone at the party turning on him, which again, isn’t very realistic, but I have more appreciation for the way Big Mouth goes about it.  First, they do include Nick initially not believing his friends’ account, and second, when the truth does come out, it culminates in a neat story about victims of harassment supporting each other.  When Daniel, still the life of the party, starts up a game of charades, Leah pantomimes making out and pushing someone’s head down, which another girl instantly recognizes as Daniel.  He tried the same stunt with her, and when she refused, he spread lies about her blowing him and earned her the nickname the “blow-job queen.”  It’s only when both these girls, who were made to feel very alone and powerless after their experiences with Daniel, find each other and corroborate each other’s stories that people start to listen.  Still overly-optimistic for anything before the incredibly-recent past, but I like the theme of girls supporting one another, as well as Nick having to confront his own assumptions when he realizes the truth.