<em>BoJack Horseman</em> Charts Complicated Paths to Forgiveness
This story contains spoilers for Season 5 of BoJack Horseman.
On this season of BoJack Horseman, the eponymous protagonist finds himself wrestling with a single weighty question: “How do you make something right when you’ve made it so wrong you can never go back?”
The animated Netflix series, which recently returned for its fifth season, has long magnified the moral inconsistencies of its anthropomorphic lead. BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) is a washed-up former TV star whose anxieties about his own dwindling fame and other inadequacies drive him to drink excessively, disrespect his friends, and treat women like interchangeable accessories at best and insensate sexual playthings at worst. He is also caustic and funny, at times even endearing in his self-effacement. In other words, BoJack is the consummate Complicated Male Protagonist.
But where other series of their male leads by writing these men’s pain as the nucleus of all other characters’ development, resists the temptation to neatly absolve its protagonist of his sins. This season, which was plotted out before the news and the ensuing rise of #MeToo, locates BoJack’s misbehavior within a larger continuum of reprehensible actions. And there are multiple story lines about men who abuse their power and prestige in the entertainment industry.
