BoJack Horseman Shines a Light on the Horse Menace

by Chris Alarie

The second season of cartoon sitcom BoJack Horseman debuts on Netflix on July 17 and it brings another helping of a deeply flawed TV show that, nonetheless, does perform one important service: demonstrating the awfulness of horses.

The show satirizes show business and takes place in a semi-recognizable, contemporary Hollywood populated by humans and humanoid animals. It centers around the titular has-been horse actor, who once starred in the popular 90s sitcom Horsin' Around but has since seen his lifestyle slowly degrade. The show features the voiceover work of a number of well-known actors and comedians, both in the regular cast and in the rather extensive guest cast.

Will Arnett and Amy Sedaris are predictably awful as BoJack and Princess Caroline—BoJack's cat agent and occasional girlfriend—respectively. Alison Brie is pleasantly forgettable as Diane, BoJack's human biographer and somewhat unrequited love interest. The bright spot in the cast is Aaron Paul—who famously played emotional drug addict Jessie Pinkman in Breaking Bad—as BoJack's freeloading, human housemate Todd.¹ The tone of the show veers inconsistently from melodrama to comedy but does have enough good jokes to make it worth watching while hungover or sick or depressed or something. Also, Grouplove's end credits song is brilliant and catchy. But the show's true value lies in its willingness to confront a taboo subject and depict horses as the wretched creatures that they truly are.

Despite being the main character, BoJack is an utterly irredeemable, unlikable figure. He is self-centered, conniving, destructive, and self-pitying. He is a bad friend, lover, housemate, client, and actor. He just drinks and causes drama without offering anything of value to the other characters around him. He is, essentially, just like a real horse.² It is admirable that BoJack Horseman's creators are willing to stand up to the Vast Equine Conspiracy in order to depict the truth about horses. One can only imagine the difficulties they have faced in bringing this truth to the screen.

While I would not venture to either convince or dissuade the reader from watching the show,³ I commend its willingness to counter the popular, false depiction of horses as noble, beautiful creatures in the face of what I am certain is significant opposition. As Princess Caroline says, after BoJack has predictably disappointed her again, “Of course, of course, that's what you get when you fall for a horse”.

Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

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1 According to the cast list, Paul F. Tompkins plays Mr. Peanutbutter. However, I've never heard of that actor and I don't remember that character despite having watched the first season of the show twice, so I think that's either a misprint or some dumb in-joke amongst the show's fans. Whatever.^↩
2 Aside from all the anthropomorphic stuff, that is.^↩
3 Honestly, I don't fucking care and I doubt the reader would be stupid enough to listen to my recommendation anyway.^↩

'Boy Meets World' Fosters Unrealistic Romantic Expectations

by Chris Alarie

One of the most insipid journalistic trends of recent years is the preponderance of articles dissecting, quantifying, and criticizing the supposed tastes, behaviors, and personality flaws of the generation known as the Millennials. Key among these articles is a sub-genre criticizing the supposed inability of Millennials to engage in healthy romantic relationships—ostensibly the result of a “hookup culture”. While these articles—including those from that paragon of Millennial-bashing, the New York Times—are obviously ill-conceived, ¹ there is some truth to the idea that the current generation is not getting married as young or at as high of a rate as previous generations. The reasons for this are complex and myriad, but there is one key cause that I believe has been overlooked: the unrealistic romantic expectations fostered by the 1990s teen drama Boy Meets World.

For seven seasons from 1993 through 2000, Boy Meets World aired on ABC as a part of its TGIF programming block.² The story of a young, Jewish boy, Cory Matthews, and his experience growing up in Philadelphia with his suspiciously un-Jewish family,³ Boy Meets World centered on Cory's romantic relationship with Topanga Lawrence, whom he would marry by the end of the series. The relationship—which, through some retconning, was depicted as being essentially lifelong—is idealized to an almost obsessive degree, not only by Topanga and (especially) Cory, but by everybody around them. Even the show's other central relationship—that between Cory and his James-Dean-lite best friend, Shawn Hunter—is heavily influenced by the Cory-Topanga relationship.

While Shawn is depicted as being envious of a number of aspects of Cory's life throughout the series (his functional family, his relative wealth, etc.), his jealousy of Cory and Topanga's ostensibly perfect relationship becomes one of his defining characteristics by the end of the series. In the middle seasons, Shawn's popularity with girls is shown to be one of his few advantages over Cory and one of the few things that brings him happiness in his otherwise troubled life. However, as the characters age and Cory and Topanga become more focused on their romantic relationship, Shawn becomes increasingly more jealous—not of Topanga for having replaced him as Cory's primary partner but rather of Cory and Topanga's relationship. In fact, he spends much of the later seasons desperately searching for “something like what Cory and Topanga have.” In particular, his more realistic, on-again, off-again relationship with Angela during the last three seasons is explicitly contrasted with the stability and magic of the Cory-Topanga union. Apparently, this has continued into the recent companion series/reboot, Girl Meets World, which depicts the same characters now in adulthood:



While the causes behind the lower marriage rate for Millennials are complicated and multivariate, I believe that a key component is that, in a sense, many of us are like Shawn: unable to settle down because we are desperate for a perfect relationship like Cory and Topanga's. Millennials are noted for our idealism, and I believe that a frustrated sort of idealism is a key factor in our lower marriage rates. Many of us are delaying marriage because we have not found our Topanga⁴ and rather than accept a realistic, flawed relationship, we are idealistically pursuing the mystical unicorn that is a Cory-Topanga style relationship. And, loathe as I am to give Buzzfeed credit for anything, that website sort of manages to illustrate this phenomenon, in a roundabout way, by identifying the problem and then simply reinforcing it in a listicle of “cute” and “heartwarming”⁵ GIFs entitled “20 Ways Cory And Topanga Gave You Unrealistic Expectations About Relationships”.

This insipid pseudo-journalism accidentally demonstrates how surprisingly influential this particular 1990s teen comedy⁶ has been in setting unrealistic romantic expectations for an entire generation,⁷ serving, in part, to hinder that generation from settling into marriage and other established relationships in a manner similar to previous generations.⁸ Some anecdotal evidence would seems to reinforce my claims, as I have had a number of conversations with unmarried Millennial friends about these topics. In these conversations, I have observed both a tendency toward what I see as unrealistic romantic expectations and a willingness to identify Boy Meets World as a partial source of those expectations. As my friend Amy told me, “Yeah man, Topanga fucked me up!”

Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

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1 One of the best takedowns of the arguments about the supposed hookup culture comes from, of all places, Jezebel.^↩

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2 The show has also aired in syndication in perpetuity over the last decade and a half.^↩

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3 The issue of Cory's singular Jewishness within his non-Jewish biological family is never explicitly addressed at any point in the show. But it reads loudly as subtext. This isn't actually relevant to my main argument, however.^↩

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4 And everyone seems to be looking for their Topanga, never their Cory—even the women with whom I spoke said that they were looking for their Topanga. I don’t know if this is just because Cory was the main character of the show or if it is old fashioned sexism, with the man being associated with agency and the woman being a passive object of desire.^↩

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5 I am also generally loathe to use scare quotes, but I think it is appropriate in this particular usage.^↩

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6 For whatever reason, Boy Meets World seems to have been a surprisingly influential TV show for the Millennial generation.^↩

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7 The unhealthy, obsessive relationship between Ross and Rachel on Friends could also conceivably have a similar sort of influence. But all of the characters on that show are so deeply disturbing in a number of ways that it is difficult to imagine anyone other than a low-level sociopath looking to them as a model for any sort of behavior.^↩

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8 I should note that I don't necessarily think that this is a bad thing. I am not trying to make an argument in favor of or against marriage but rather try to explain the undue influence that Boy Meets World has had in regards to this issue.^↩