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Situating Netflix’s Original Adult an interdisciplinary journal

2020, Vol. 15(2) 116­–129
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Cultures and the Legacies of

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DOI: 10.1177/1746847720933791
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‘Quality’ Television through

BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth

Eddie Falvey
Plymouth College of Art, UK

Abstract
This article aims to expand upon a key aspect of Mareike Jenner’s work on Netflix original
comedy by considering how the streaming network’s original adult animated series reflect
developments occurring within the sitcom format post-TV III. Using Netflix original animations
BoJack Horseman (2014–) and Big Mouth (2017–) as case studies, this article will consider how
thematically complex, ostensibly ‘smart’ animated shows illustrate changing industrial dynamics
and taste cultures. While exhibiting qualities found in preceding key adult animated shows such
as South Park (Comedy Central 1997–) and Family Guy (Fox 1999–), including lewd humour,
metatextual in-jokes and topicality, the knotty storytelling and ambiguous characterizations of the
shows under discussion reflect links to other contexts of TV production. Exploring these links,
this article uses BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth to explore current trends in animated television,
situating their characteristics and reception within a broader network of influences. The author
argues that the turn towards complex storytelling manifests both in inherited production tactics,
changing taste cultures and in the multifaceted and multifarious potentialities provided by the
medium itself.

Keywords
adult animation, animated television, Big Mouth, BoJack Horseman, genre studies, Netflix,
reception studies, sitcom, television studies

Corresponding author:
Eddie Falvey, School of Arts and Media, Plymouth College of Art, Room 1.19, Tavistock Place, Plymouth PL4 8AT, UK.
Email: [email protected]
Falvey 117

This is a situation comedy! No one watches the show to feel feelings. Life is depressing enough already!
(‘Brand New Couch’, BoJack Horseman, S2E1)

This article aims to expand upon a key aspect of Mareike Jenner’s work on Netflix original comedy
from her book Netflix and the Re-Invention of Television (2018). In that work, Jenner observes that
while the ‘narrative structures and aesthetics do not tend to differ much from the American “quality”
TV texts of TV III [c. 1995–]’, they nevertheless exhibit textual particularities that are redolent of
the ‘cultural politics of [the Netflix] era’ (p. 139). Jenner’s work positions Netflix original shows,
both dramas (e.g. House of Cards, 2013–2018; Orange Is the New Black, 2013–2019) and comedies
(e.g. the revival of Arrested Development, 2013–; Master of None, 2016–2017) against the legacy of
TV III. As such, Jenner finds commonalities between the ‘quality’ features of shows both before and
after the Netflix explosion that culminated in the production of original content for the network,
both in the form of serial television (from 2013) and film (from 2015). Yet, there is one significant
type of work that has been left unexplored by Jenner: the production and popular reception of adult-
oriented serial animations that knowingly traverse the ‘quality’/‘popular’ binary that dialectically
determines much of the scholarship relating to television. In thematically mature ongoing series
such as BoJack Horseman (2014–), a highly metatextual sitcom following the mid-life crises of a
former sitcom star, and Big Mouth (2017–), a sitcom focusing on the various trials of puberty for a
group of 7th graders, the medium has been shown to cross established demographic modalities to
offer perceptive deconstructions of genre, challenging and complex portraits of mental health, and
controversial illustrations of childhood sexual and social development. This article will use these
shows as case studies in a bid to observe how current trends in animated television reflect upon
ongoing developments within the ever-changing cultures of TV consumption.

Not for kids: ‘Quality’ and intertextual ‘smartness’ in Netflix

animation
TV and cultural studies scholars preceding Jenner have long been attempting to explain the explo-
sion of ‘must-see’ TV, shows ‘distinguished by the compulsive viewing practices of dedicated audi-
ences who organize their schedules around [them]’ (Jancovich and Lyons, 2003: 2). In today’s
radically evolved media climate, the necessity to commit oneself to a weekly viewing slot has
eroded in light of widespread media availability that has provided new digital platforms and models
for television viewership that include bingeing.1 If Netflix, the host platform for the shows under
discussion, is not wholly illustrative of all the variances presented by these new models, then it is at
least indicative of some of their salient features. Indeed, as has been noted by Kevin McDonald and
Daniel Smith-Rowsey (2016: 1–2), ‘Netflix has had a transformative effect in the relationship
between consumers and content providers’, noting the network’s devotion to ‘high-quality media
content, the type of entertainment that has been traditionally produced by the Hollywood studios
and major television networks’. Netflix’s rise to prominence has naturally opened up debates about
what does and does not constitute television due to its embodiment of some of the more fundamental
transformations happening in light of changing viewing cultures – one might ask, for instance, if a
show is not watched on television, but rather on a laptop or iPad, is it still allowed to be called televi-
sion (see Green, 2008)? So while digital, subscription-based platforms are moving television in new
directions, the move towards ‘quality’ content is certainly not without precedent.
According to scholarship on the topic, television has come of age not once but several times,
with the most recent shift happening somewhere near the beginning of HBO’s late 1990s ascension
(see Newman and Levine, 2012). What emerges from scholarship is the sense that much of the
process of determinating (or, indeed, over-determinating) ‘quality’ TV occurs at a discursive level.
Distinguishing ‘quality’ television from that which is (by inference) lacking in quality recalls
118 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 15(2)

Pierre Bourdieu’s (1987: 2) identification of the unconscious ‘classificatory schemes’ that deter-
mine taste cultures. It is Bourdieau’s view that the elevation and validation of particular tastes over
others reinforce class hierarchies by naturalizing certain cultural objects as more important than
others. Michael Z Newman and Elana Levine (2012: 13) say as much of television:

Alongside the discourse of television’s rising respectability, its aestheticization and sophistication, are
these reminders of all that has long kept television entertainment from being equal to other arts. Embedded
within the discourse of legitimation are often such allusions to the medium’s lurking inferiority, even as
we hear of the many ways in which TV may be escaping its historical constraints. Legitimation always
works by selection and exclusion; TV becomes respectable through the elevation of one concept of the
medium at the expense of another.

Through Newman and Levine’s refutation of the discursive function of ‘quality’, it is clear how
significant received ideas about what is and is not of value precede and determine cultural legitima-
tion for shows falling on both sides of the line.
Jane Feuer (2013: 145) has further muddied the waters, noting that ‘quality’ shows such as
HBO’s Six Feet Under ‘not only [have] clear ancestry within art cinema’, but also bear ‘significant
debt’ to earlier modes of television production. Feuer identifies that the ‘quality’ debate draws
focus to the fact that current trends can be situated in relation to contexts outside of television.
Correspondingly, another context that is seldom mentioned in regards to TV, but is worth scrutiniz-
ing here, is the coinciding rise of ‘smart’ cinema in the mid to late 1990s. While Jeffery Sconce’s
(2002: 349–369) formulation of ‘smart’ cinema is mostly used in reference to film, it seems clear
that a traceable genealogy of ‘smartness’ exists across film and TV production. And yet, ‘smart’
cinema – encapsulated in those ‘dark comed[ies] and disturbing drama[s] born out of ironic dis-
tance [and] all that is not positive and “dumb”’ that Sconce identifies (p. 358) – becomes a usable
template for understanding aspects of a show such as BoJack Horseman, a ‘smart’ sitcom that
depends upon complex knowledge of form. In the show’s utilization of a complex and morally
bankrupt antihero, employment of pointedly referential narrative arcs, intelligent treatment of
mature themes and current affairs, and deep affection for irony, the show may be understood in
relational terms. The notion that film and television grew up at similar times and in similar ways
provides a new way of observing the salient features of ‘quality’ television as reflective of develop-
ments happening across a range of media. That the wry, reflective humour and ensemble dynamics
of Arrested Development in part resemble the films of Wes Anderson (see Newman and Levine,
2012: 72) or that the complex, character-heavy plotting of The Sopranos or The Wire resembles the
ensemble features of Paul Thomas Anderson illustrates the fact that film and television were devel-
oping in tandem. Not only do the aesthetic and thematic properties of ‘smart’ cinema correlate with
particular facets of ‘quality’ television, but the notion of auteur-led television series illustrates the
hierarchical elevation of these co-existing (or even co-producing) modes.2 This is far from the only
evidence of convergences occurring between ‘smart’ cinema and ‘quality’ television, with ‘smart’
filmmakers such as Spike Lee, Noah Baumbach and the Coen brothers now producing ‘quality’
content for Netflix and other networks. Claire Perkins (2012) and, more recently, Laura Canning
(2013) have both written of ‘smart’ cinema’s transgeneric credentials, though few have touched
upon a genealogy operating across media. Arguably, many of the ‘quality’ shows that aired during
TV III’s prime illustrate aesthetic and thematic overlaps with ‘smart’ cinema, thus demonstrating a
genealogy of ‘smartness’ that traverses production modalities.
The usefulness of this observation increases when one considers how discursively ‘smart’ shows
such as Dan Harman’s Community (NBC 2009–2014; Yahoo! 2015–2016) and Rick and Morty
(Adult Swim 2014–) utilize film history as a substantial resource, riffing on iconic plots in many
episodes (also a feature of ‘smart’ cinema: see Perkins, 2012: 45). Constantine Verevis (2006: 20),
Falvey 119

in his work on film remakes, discusses forms of textual allusion, writing that the term ‘suggests a
wide range of practices’, including ‘imitation, pastiche and parody’. Hosted by Netflix (at the time
of writing), if not produced by them, Rick and Morty demonstrates a clear and influential aware-
ness of the cultural (and subcultural) capital of intextuality. One need not look any further than a
list of episode titles for a quick illustration of the referentiality that functions as a primary structur-
ing principle for the show.3 The correlative between animation and ‘smart’ comedy – certainly the
presence of intertextuality, or quotation – has been noted in scholarship (see, for example,
Weinstock, 2008). Elsewhere, Holly Randell-Moon and Arthur J Randell (2013: 136) claim that
Archer (FX 2009–), another key adult animated series from the last decade, ‘makes creative use of
the limited animation format to achieve a greater economy of visual humour and style with a focus
on complex dialogue and characterization, complemented by an idiosyncratic intertextuality’.
It is fair to claim that Rick and Morty, and BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth following that, all
capitalize on the subcultural currency generated by a culturally literate audience keen on close
reading. BoJack Horseman’s appeal to cultural literacy is evident in its treatment of current hot
topics – one needs to look no further than episodes dedicated to the topics of abortion and planned
parenthood (‘Brrap Brrap Pew Pew’, S3E6), gun ownership (‘Thoughts and Prayers’, S4E5), and
sexual assault (much of season 5) to find evidence of the show’s pointed political leanings.
Meanwhile, cameos from and depictions of cult stars (see Alan Arkin’s recurring role as JD
Salinger) and specialized background gags demonstrate the show’s invitation for close reading. At
one point, this feature actually becomes the topic of a joke in an otherwise throwaway gag in which
a market vendor holds up a t-shirt reading: STOP PAUSING AND JUST WATCH THE SHOW
(‘The Amelia Earhart Story’, S5E5). The largely inconsequential gag mocks close readers, intimat-
ing towards Sconce’s (2002: 365) suggestion that ‘smart’ films ‘assume a culture (or, more to the
point, an audience) of master semioticians hyper-aware of how and what objects signify’.4
That subcultural capital constitutes a significant currency in BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth
is evidence that part of the shows’ appeal depends on enveloping discourses that relay and rein-
force their ‘smartness’, rendered here in overt intertextuality. Incorporated within the shows’ allu-
sive style is a system of signification that reveals much about how the show imagines its audience,
recognizing them as self-identifying pop culture aficionados. In the cultivation of an aesthetic of
allusion, the creators of these shows demonstrate a hyperawareness not only of the value of inter-
textuality to reinforce its ‘smart’ credentials, but of its participation in ongoing debates about taste
cultures. Such hyperawareness is hardly a new tactic; Jeffrey Weinstock (2008: 3) has observed
gags in South Park that criticize the sort of toilet humour that it so regularly depends on, ‘self-
referentially foreground[ing] similar attacks on the program’. Both shows demonstrate a hypera-
wareness of their audience embodied by the meta-theatrical gestures that they make towards the
fourth wall. Though reception studies accounts for myriad forms of textual engagement which
suggests that viewers watch TV shows in various ways and with access to different levels and
degrees of referentiality, it is clear that such tactics signify clear aspirations among show-runners
to establish a certain type of audience. In their book Reading Television, John Fiske and John
Hartley (2003: 47) discuss the codification of televisual signs, stating that:

reality is itself a complex system of signs interpreted by members of the culture in exactly the same way
as are films or television programmers. Perception of this reality is always mediated through the codes
with which our culture organizes it, categorizes its significant elements or semes into paradigms, and
relates them significantly into syntagms.

Fiske and Hartley’s semiotic reading of television compounds the notion that the medium speaks
in a distinct language that represents a clear part of the cultural ‘reality’ from which it emerged.
120 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 15(2)

From this, it is evident that syntagmatic readings of pop culture references bring to light the rela-
tionality of corresponding signifiers operating within a determinate network of meaning. The
heavy flow of references conveys a possibility that the universe that BoJack Horseman takes place
in is, ultimately, a simulacrum of pop culture itself and, as such, pop cultural literacy in viewers
affords them a privileged capacity to read submerged signifiers within the show. From the various
websites and YouTube channels that have published features devoted to episode-by-episode hunts
for such references (see Patton, 2018, and AllTimeMovies, 2017), it is clear that the time required
to uncover everything entails significant commitment (and ideally a salary). This is different, one
might argue, from the ways in which preceding adult animated shows such as South Park (Comedy
Central 1997–) or Family Guy (Fox 1999–) operate. While ostensibly exhibiting similar qualities
– dark and/or lewd humour, intertextuality, and topicality – South Park and Family Guy have more
in common with sitcoms such as Friends (NBC 1994–2004) for administering serialized, soapy
narratives through the prism of the developing sitcom format. Despite clear antecedents in ani-
mated sitcoms such as South Park and Family Guy, there is a point of distinction between their
pronounced seriality and the overarching narratives that BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth depend
upon. M Keith Booker (2006: 155) has recognized shifts towards more adult content occurring
around the time of Family Guy and South Park that are illustrative of the steps towards the style of
the shows under discussion here, writing that ‘the early years of the twenty-first century have seen
a number of new programs that seem overtly designed to attract audiences by flouting the conven-
tions of television animation, much in the mode of South Park.’
Big Mouth follows in South Park’s footsteps, utilizing childhood as a platform for transgressive,
adult humour. KJ Donnelly (2008: 158) writes that ‘a principal attraction of both The Simpsons and
South Park is that they allow a kind of regression to childhood for their adult viewers.’ Just as
South Park often relies on its audience’s familiarity with current affairs, with episodes regularly
citing topical events for narrative or gag frameworks, Big Mouth certainly exhibits a tendency to
do the same, drawing on topical debates such as the ongoing discussion of sex education. In an
early episode, ‘Everybody Bleeds’ (S1E2), Jessi finds herself facing her first period while on a
class trip to the Statue of Liberty. The episode finds currency in the various problems that arise out
of a vague and unhelpful national discourse on child sexual development. Finding herself flustered
by the unwanted attention she has received from her classmates, Jessi retorts: ‘It’s not a disease, it’s
totally normal and I know that no one talks about it, but everyone gets their period and now I got
mine, in white fucking shorts!’ Given the show’s recurring concern over the importance of educat-
ing teenagers in transparent terms about the particularities of sexual development (see also: ‘The
Planned Parenthood Show’, S2E5), the soiling of Jessi’s white shorts serves as a symbolic reminder
of just how poor standards of sex education are at present.
Following Jessi’s outburst, in a moment of thematic catharsis, an anthropomorphized, Michael
Stipe-esque tampon delivers the episode’s titular song, ‘Everybody Bleeds’ (a riff on R.E.M.’s
popular anthem ‘Everybody Hurts’). The sequence offers an appropriately bombastic and formally
stylized embodiment of Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) suggestion that the medium is the message.
The episode places into the mouth of a tampon the common experience of female menstruation
and, in doing so, vocalizes a prevailing frustration over the lack of a functional discourse on sexual
development. That the episode can convey its message on its own characteristically ostentatious
terms owes much to the fact that Big Mouth is an animated work. Not only does it manage to cir-
cumvent the ethical implications of using child actors for a show of this nature, but the form pro-
vides a platform for surreal experimentation that might not be possible outside of the animated
medium.
Therefore, both shows utilize intertextuality that is largely born out of a litany of nostalgic refer-
ences to both popular and obscure objects of paracultural significance. From episode titles to visual
Falvey 121

allusions to throwaway gags, BoJack Horseman’s intertextuality – that is, referential correspond-
ence between texts – manifests as ‘clever’ nods towards topical discussions and the larger pop
canon. Henri Bergson (1911: 7–8) wrote that in order ‘to understand laughter, we must put it back
into its natural environment, which is society, and above all else we must determine the utility of
its function which is a social one’. If such humour lacks a clear social function, as per Bergson’s
argument, then in its establishment of a fan community that is founded upon the shared recognition
of carefully deployed citations designed for deep reading, the jokes do have a socializing function
among the show’s more discerning fan base. It has been the aim of this section to question the
determinate categories that have been employed to explain certain developments in film and televi-
sion. It is evident that contemporary media has developed simultaneously and in overlapping ways
with certain elements becoming similarly entrenched in adjacent media formats. By observing the
salient features of coinciding modes of film and television production, it is easy to see how rigid
categories fail to account for multifaceted shifts occurring across media.

A portrait of the artist as a young horse: Complex storytelling in

BoJack Horseman
All I know about being good, I learned from TV. (‘Free Churro’, BoJack Horseman, S5E6)

Much is written about the sitcom as a historical paradigm for television, yet it continues to evolve
in new and interesting ways. Saul Austerlitz (2014: 4) writes that:

a sitcom is defined by its episodes. Each episode is a self-enclosed world, a brief overturning of the
established order of its universe before returning, unblemished, to the precise spot from which it began –
or, as is increasingly the case in more modern sitcoms, some other place entirely.

For Austerlitz (2014: 2), the sitcom is defined by constancy; what he calls ‘the phenomenon of eternal
return’. So, what is required of a sitcom? In the words of one colleague, all that a sitcom ultimately
needs is a sofa – that is, somewhere to sit. Their suggestion is rather illuminating. No doubt there are
studies to be conducted on the use of furniture in the sitcom, yet the notion that such shows are con-
structed around a focal domestic space is illustrative not only of the show’s central themes, but of
their constancy (in Austerlitz’s terms) and thematic aspiration to offer routine comfort (a plausible
basis for a secondary meaning of ‘com’, after comedy). That so many shows – The Simpsons, Beavis
and Butthead, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory – have
this simple feature in common, speaks to the value of a shared domestic setting to the sitcom genre.
In modern examples, Austerlitz’s notion of constancy manifests with varying degrees of flexi-
bility, not least in regard to animated shows ranging from The Simpsons to BoJack Horseman.
Accounting for changing ideas about sitcoms, Brett Mills (2005: 25–26) writes that:

debates about genre are . . . not about constructing watertight definitions which outline the characteristics
a programme must have in order to be granted the designation ‘sitcom’. Instead, the key question is, ‘why
is such a programme understood to belong to this particular genre?’

Mills’ question allows space for including series that offer different forms of constancy, post-
sitcoms including the likes of Arrested Development, Community and BoJack Horseman, to be
discussed here. BoJack Horseman’s credentials as a sitcom are self-evident, even if it appears
somewhat incongruous beside the likes of The Simpsons or Friends. Arguably, this incongruity
is not so much due to the show’s ironic, self-conscious style – a characteristic that arises in
122 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 15(2)

other examples, including those previously mentioned – but, rather, due to its use of complex
storytelling.
It is easy to observe that BoJack Horseman trades in dark, existential themes, a hyper-awareness
of its status as a serial show, a tendency for ironic humour and a sustained nihilistic tone. Unlike the
sitcoms mentioned above, which offer sentimental distractions, routine televisual comfort food from
the trials of everyday life, the thematic centre of BoJack Horseman is fundamentally tragic. BoJack
may have dubious credentials as the show’s ‘hero’, but that alone is not enough to remove it from
the boundaries of the genre (see The Simpson’s Homer). Most interesting here is BoJack Horseman’s
utilization of complex storytelling tactics, which offer a clearer marker of divergence from preced-
ing sitcoms. Discussing complex storytelling, Jason Mittell (2015: 6) offers a theory of cognitive
poetics (drawn from Bordwell, 2007), as one means of deliberating a text’s complex elements:

We can best understand the process of viewing (or reading literature) by drawing on our knowledge of
cognition and perception and then positing how the formal elements in a text might be experienced by such
a viewer – while viewers are not reduced to their mental mechanics, the insights of cognitive psychology
inform how we imagine the possible ways that viewers engage with film or television.

BoJack Horseman’s sensitivity to current affairs is at least one way of measuring its complexity.
Indeed, Lenika Cruz (2018) has discussed how the show has intelligently invoked the #MeToo
movement, praising its ‘ambitious meta-critique of how Hollywood consistently glorifies,
humanizes, enables, and forgives bad men – fictional or otherwise’, a meta-critique that so far
has crucially refused to spare BoJack himself from scrutiny. Mittell’s phenomenological
approach to complex television draws on a show’s affective impact on the viewer, considering
how viewers cognitively and, therefore perceptively, process its formal and thematic elements.
Situated beside more traditional sitcoms such as Friends, in which the characters remain largely
unchanged across multiple seasons (does, for instance, Joey really change over the course of the
show’s 10 seasons?),5 complex sitcoms such as BoJack Horseman demonstrate substantially
more intricate character arcs that require greater investment from viewers. While Friends offers
cross-episode plotting and ongoing romantic subplots, a casual viewer will largely not be diso-
rientated by dipping into a random episode.
Complex sitcoms are different; even if they remain principally episodic by nature, the com-
plexities of BoJack’s character arc, in particular, forms a trajectory that might alienate an uncom-
mitted viewer. Mittell (2015: 127) notes that ‘character consistency is . . . one of the primary ways
that viewers engage with programming’, however it is clear that BoJack defies regular sitcom
characterization. More useful, perhaps, is Amanda Lotz’s (2014a) work on complex characteriza-
tions in contemporary cable television in which she scrutinizes the ‘multiplicity of series . . . that
probe the trials and complexities of contemporary manhood’. Indeed, the creators of BoJack
Horseman have continued this trend while making experimental use of animation’s tactile proper-
ties in order to amplify an episode’s thematic preoccupation with masculinity in crisis. In a near-
wordless episode of BoJack Horseman set entirely underwater (‘Fish Out of Water’, S3E4), the
creators exploit the narrative opportunities offered by animation to further the episode’s central
themes, namely distance and dislocation. ‘Fish Out of Water’ mounts an episode-long metaphor to
convey BoJack’s dissociative disorder at breaking point, with the form expressly employed to
illustrate the character’s non-normative and quickly deteriorating worldview. The episode, which
nods to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), finds BoJack approaching the depths of
despair; faced with promoting his new film, BoJack attends an underwater film festival where he
finds himself unable to properly communicate due to the constraining breathing apparatus. The
notably avant-garde episode offers an episode-length portrait of BoJack’s mounting loneliness, a
Falvey 123

concrete simulacrum of his increasingly alienating apathy that manifests in a nihilistic imaginary
that actualizes his escalating condition.6
Similarly, ostentatious episodes such as ‘Downer Ending’ (S1E11), ‘Stupid Piece of Shit’
(S4E6) and ‘Time’s Arrow’ (S4E11) artfully convey the impact of BoJack’s substance abuse and
deteriorating mental health. It is illuminating that such episodes are usually singled out as among
the best of their respective series, attracting attention for their complex treatment of the show’s
principal characters. ‘Stupid Piece of Shit’, for instance, provides the audience with BoJack’s
inner-monologue, offering a degree of access to his depression and suicidal thoughts that consid-
erably stretch the show’s credentials as a ‘comedy’. Nevertheless, that episode resonated with
viewers, who found BoJack’s incessant self-loathing a rare, honest depiction of the hold that
depression can have on the mind (see Sarappo, 2017). A recent avant-garde episode, ‘Free Churro’,
finds BoJack delivering a eulogy at a funeral. As BoJack traces back in time across a series of
formative but troubling memories, he dominates the frame. The focus on BoJack tricks the viewer
into believing that he is experiencing a moment of genuine catharsis – who knows, perhaps on his
own terms, he is – before revealing, in the episode’s final moments, that BoJack is at the wrong
funeral (it is not, as we thought, the funeral of his mother, but rather the funeral of a complete
stranger). Reviewers of season five have cited ‘Free Churro’ in particular as one of its strongest
episodes, commenting on the simple set-up and sobering dismantlement of BoJack’s ego. Greg
Cwik (2018) writes:

The funeral soliloquy, and the season overall, is perhaps the apogee of [voice actor Will] Arnett’s career,
by turns sad, somber, irreverent, irrelevant, furious, an irascible but vulnerable portrayal of self-loathing
and addiction. It’s as if BoJack has slit himself open and shamelessly allowed everyone to see the rot inside
of him. During one circuitous, calloused digression, he muses, ‘You can’t have happy endings in sitcoms
because if everyone is happy, the show is over.’

Despite lacking the emotional resolution of a more traditional sitcom, who is to say whether BoJack
is defeated by the revelation that his epic emotional denouement has been wasted on a group of
strangers? Ambiguity such as this is one marker of a complex characterization. Complex characters
depend upon inconclusive readings (for example, Tony Soprano, Don Draper and Walter White)
(see Lotz, 2014a); their actions and ideas do not provide total portraits of them, but rather offer the
viewer slices of information that they can take in a variety of different ways. BoJack is charming
and witty, but he is also a manic-depressive, an addict, and sometimes even, to borrow the charac-
ter’s own words, a total ‘piece of shit’. He is a toxic influence on himself and almost everyone
around him, including those he supposedly cares for, individuals he is more than willing to drag
down to the depths of his despair. Nevertheless, the critical acclaim that these episodes have
attracted directly correlates with the show’s commitment to deepening BoJack’s character arc
while refusing to offer simple answers or neat resolutions.

Naturalizing youth’s otherness: Animating abjection in Big Mouth

For whom is Big Mouth intended? While demonstrably a show about children, it does not appear
to be for children, especially given its procilivity for lewd content. While the decision to cast adult
vocal performers in the young roles was no doubt encouraged by the recognizable status of the
central cast, one wonders if an ethical consideration was also made given the prospect of putting
such crude content into the mouths of young performers. However, such ethical objections would
be at risk of disrupting one of the central mantras of the show: that the issues facing young people
should be discussed with them, and that generating a transparent discourse on sex is important to
124 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 15(2)

the safeguarding of children. By offering a nuanced, sensitive and metatextual examination of teen
representation, Big Mouth makes a clear argument for the need to create a transparent discourse on
sex education for the benefit of young people.
It is a message that Big Mouth clearly seeks to address in episodes such as ‘Everybody Bleeds’,
aforementioned. In fact, Nick Kroll (see Schneider, 2017), one of the show’s central creators,
articulates this in an online interview, stating that he would ‘love for parents to watch it with their
kids . . . it is very dirty [but] my hope is it gives kids and parents some version of tools and a lan-
guage to communicate what the kids are going through and the parents are going through.’ Kroll’s
aspiration for inter-generational understanding arguably sets Big Mouth apart from the other shows
under discussion. Comparatively, BoJack Horseman is stand-offish with its central characteriza-
tions and whiplash utilization of transmedial signifiers and is mostly invested in the deadpan
deconstruction of its cultural moment. Big Mouth, meanwhile, has the positive message that com-
munication is key to bridging cultural divides, that growing up is gross but that is OK because
everyone does it. While the show’s dirtiness captures this central theme, Big Mouth carefully
refracts orbiting debates about sex education. While some have taken the show’s bait,7 in the style
of South Park before it, lewd humour similarly gives way to insightful and affecting social
commentary.
Big Mouth conveys the passage of teenage sexual development (in line with Victor Turner’s,
liminality hypothesis, 1969) through the affective responses it provokes. These responses are
rooted in the description of its characters’ abject experiences, manifested in the corporeal embodi-
ment of changes enacted on the body by puberty. If the show renders the abject through the ‘horror’
of the body in developmental flux, then that feeling is doubled in the viewer’s abject response to
its provocative content. Beginning with Julia Kristeva (1982: 58), ‘abjection, or the journey to the
end of the night’ as she poetically describes it, conveys the horrors exemplified by one’s confronta-
tion of their own subjective and, in this case, socially displacing corporeal reality. Abjection, for
Elizabeth Gross (1990: 90), is ‘what disturbs identity, system and order, disrupting the social
boundaries imposed by the symbolic. It respects no definite positions, or rules, boundaries, or
socially imposed limits.’ Such encounters with the body bring to mind the Foucauldian notion of
the heterotopia (1984 [1967]: 1–9) wherein the subjective worlds of its young protagonists trans-
form into spaces of corporeal and social imbalance, embodied in the specific ‘rites and purifica-
tions’ (p. 7) of teenage sexual development that its protagonists endure in puberty. The social
spaces in Big Mouth double as sites of bodily transformation, made abject by the ways in which
they reconfigure the self as other. Classrooms and bedrooms, etc. therefore become liminal sites of
erasure, otherness and puberty-induced monstrosity that smartly foreground hot-topic debates
beyond the show (see Carleton, 2018). In her discussion of the institutional spaces of Carrie (dir.
Brian De Palma, 1976), Frances Pheasant-Kelly (2013: 44) writes that ‘the high school prom is a
focal point of American socio-cultural tradition, important as a rite of passage and in establishing
a coherent body image.’ The complex spaces of high school emerge, here and there, as heterotopic
labyrinths of unfamiliar subcultural structures that offer new, formative experiences for the show’s
young characters.
In season two, Big Mouth introduces the Shame Wizard, a character designed to reflect on the
systemic ways in which young people punish themselves to the point of despair for actions beyond
their understanding. (At one point, the Shame Wizard asks Andrew, ‘you’re not the sort of boy who
rubs fronts with the world’s saddest girl and leaves right after, are you?’) Not only do these anxie-
ties articulate the show’s appeal for a transparent discourse on sexual development and the effects
of puberty, but they illustrate the malleability of social spaces that transform in accordance with the
experiences they play host to. After the scandal of being outed as a ‘front rubber’, Andrew relo-
cates to Guy Town, a seedy, run-down complex designed for single men and run by Guy Bilzerian,
Falvey 125

a shady lawyer who ‘lives balls out and gives zero fucks’. Andrew is aware that he has behaved
poorly, yet the public shaming that follows leads him straight into the arms of Bilzerian who swal-
lows him up with his chauvinistic, aggrandizing rhetoric (he re-brands Andrew ‘pimp of the month’
which, he concedes, is preferable to being labelled a ‘creep’). In Guy Town, Andrew and Nick
experience first-hand the difficulties of trying to navigate the rites of passage toward manhood,
whatever that may be, when all the signs are pointed in opposing directions. There is not a single
better example of a heterotopic space than Guy Town, which mostly operates as a spatial facsimile
for various forms of outlying masculinity. The episode spatializes Nick and Andrew’s developing
understandings (and, concomitantly, misunderstandings) of manhood framed against a cultural
backdrop in which masculinity is being held accountable for its actions. As the cast of characters
observe abject masculinity in its various forms, they come to learn that it is in fact a fluid, indefin-
able thing, an understanding that leads them to make important decisions about the sort of men that
they want to be.
Indeed, in a cultural climate in which toxic masculinity is finally being held to account by
Twitter-led online movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp, Big Mouth’s ‘smart’ handling of the
topic is especially worthy of scrutiny. The treatment of male accountability for sexual impropriety
in Big Mouth is satirical yet remains interesting, nuanced even. The show asks that, in order to
generate a clear route towards progress, distinctions should be made between insensitive ‘asshole’
behaviour and actual sex crimes so as not to dilute the message. In the course of this narrative arc,
Andrew demonstrates the importance of discussing and, in doing so, destabilizing toxic notions of
masculinity while illustrating how a polysemous treatment of complex issues, such as accountabil-
ity for sexual misconduct, can disrupt the initial agenda. This narrative arc culminates with ‘Dark
Side of the Boob’ (S2E8), an episode in which the Shame Wizard infiltrates the school gymnasium
during a sleepover to wrench guilt from each of the students for their various wrongdoings, a
sequence in which the (relative) security of the school gymnasium transforms into an unstable
space of guilt-fuelled misery. Big Mouth exhibits a clear incentive to animate the largely ineffable
experience of growing up, a goal made possible by an adult cast, ‘smart’ tactics and the limitless
potentialities of the animated mode.
Suzanne Buchan (2018: 203–229) has observed animation’s capacity to convey feelings of
abjection in her analysis of the works of Suzan Pitt and Tabaimo. Buchan makes a case to ‘examine
abjection as a cultural phenomenon expressed through the opportunities animation presents to art-
ists . . . to engage us visually through animated scenes, narratives and metaphors of abjection,
revulsion, and illness’ (p. 205). This potential is conveyed in one sequence in which Jessi has a
productive conversation with her vagina (‘Girls are Horny Too’, S1E5). Startled by the sweet voice
issuing from between her legs (cult star Kristen Wiig lends her voice to Jessi’s vagina), Jessi
engages in playful chatter as she interrogates her newly-discovered sexual anatomy. The sequence
is underpinned by the persuasive suggestion that female sexual pleasure is often absent from peda-
gogical agendas. ‘Do you want the grand tour?’, Jessi’s vagina asks her invitingly before introduc-
ing her to her clitoris: ‘that’s where the party happens’, she professes with a hint of glee.
While conservative critics might take issue with the depiction of a 13-year-old in dialogue with
her explicitly drawn genitals, the sequence nevertheless makes the compelling claim that abject
responses to the body, and to graphic depictions of it, are a relative consequence of the neglectful
way in which it has been framed in broader cultural discourse. Indeed, in one such article, con-
servative critic and pro-lifer Monica Kline (2018) denounces an episode entitled ‘The Planned
Parenthood Show’ (S2E5) for being ‘way off the mark’ and for, in her words, ‘normalize[ing] high-
risk behaviors that lead to disease, depression, and ending the lives of preborn children’. This is
exactly the mindset that the show is eager to address. In episodes such as ‘The Planned Parenthood
Show’, Big Mouth suggests that rather than handcuff young people with the moral judgements of
126 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 15(2)

others, they should be educated so as to empower them to make informed decisions about their own
bodies and lives. By contrast, there have been significantly more defences of the show’s liberal
agenda. One such defence, written by KT Hawbaker of the Chicago Tribune, claims that ‘in 10
episodes, [Big Mouth] manages to address everything from queer oral histories and the myth of
masculinity to slut-shaming and relational aggression among girls – more than most U.S. high
school sex ed classes would ever embark upon’ (KT Hawbaker, cited in Shugerman, 2018).
Both BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth demonstrate how recent animated TV has aspired to
engage directly with various aspects of the present cultural economy. These shows exhibit a deter-
mination to create utopias of objective cultural scrutiny in which current anxieties are vocalized
and, in some circumstances, reconciled, as is the case with the overthrowing of the Shame Wizard
in Big Mouth. Writing on science fiction, Jan Johnson-Smith (2005: 22) argues that:

just as [science fiction] cannot belong to an existing version of reality because its entire raison d’être is to
speculate and encourage speculation about other potential and plausible realities, so a more practical
starting point is to consider that realism in any genre is wholly internal and produced anew in every
discourse.

Given that total creation is a chief facet of the animated medium, Johnson-Smith’s comments
might seem equally true when mapped onto the shows under discussion. Big Mouth, just as with
BoJack Horseman, makes clear use of the sociopolitical contexts from which they arise, employing
hot-button topics as currency for the shows’ relevance and topicality.8

Conclusion: The critical economy of reflectionism in adult

animation
Granted, the reflectionist approach outlined above is hardly the most popular of critical methodolo-
gies. Recalling David Bordwell’s (2007: 32) claim that ‘ideology doesn’t switch on the camera’, the
notion that television (and film) convey something meaningful about the world in which they are
made is usually responsible for an epistemological loop that is as unlikely as it is infectious. The
impulse to state without hesitation that film and television capture something of the world is one that
has forever been haunting scholars of film and associated media. As Bordwell writes, ‘reflectionists
have always been reluctant to offer a concrete causal account of how widely held attitudes and anxi-
eties within an audience could find their way into artworks’ (2007: 31, emphasis original). True as
that may be for the study of 1950s Hollywood and the like, what we have today, courtesy of the
internet, is copious digital data that paints an altogether different picture of a work’s reception.
The critical economy – that is, the largely unanimous acclaim – upon which the reputations and
subsequent fandoms of BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth are erected, conveys a clear awareness
of the cultural debates that orbit them. It is evident from the various articles and think pieces that
populate this research that there is a clear tendency by popular critics to treat these shows as ‘smart’
reflections on the present. While one should be careful not to qualify their reading of any work with
a catch-all analytic framework, the materials available demonstrate that shows such as these are
being employed as transmedial objects that are actively contributing to cultural debates. Naturally,
further research could be done to see how other Netflix original animation shows such as F For
Family (2015–), Disenchantment (2018–), Paradise PD (2018–) and Super Drags (2018) have
utilized current affairs as textual currency. The question of future research aside, this article has
argued that current trends in animated television can be genealogically situated in relation to wider
industrial tendencies across media, thus unravelling binary distinctions that are often made between
film and television. Furthermore, it directs that scholarship could afford to back down from tribal
Falvey 127

approaches to relativism over reflectionism and acknowledge that one can regard works differently
in light of the hypermedial circumstances from which they emerge.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and publication of this article, and there
is no conflict of interest.

Notes
1. For key work on bingeing cultures, see Brunsdon (2010) and Lotz (2014b).
2. Alan Ball, for instance, is responsible for writing a key ‘smart’ film, American Beauty (dir. Sam Mendes,
1999), and for creating both HBO’s Six Feet Under (2001–2005) and True Blood (2008–2014).
3. See ‘Anatomy Park’ (S1E3), a riff on Jurassic Park (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993), for one example.
4. This gag takes aim at the sort of audience members who devote excessive amounts of time and energy to
decoding Futurama’s language, or compiling exhaustive lists of Rick and Morty references.
5. For a detailed scrutinizing of the cultural and industrial impact of Friends, see Cobb et al. (2018:
683–691).
6. Of course, nihilism is a prominent characteristic of Sconce’s notion of ‘smartness’.
7. One online CitizenGo poll in fact sought to block Big Mouth’s release, calling it ‘underage pornography’;
see https://www.citizengo.org/en/md/92875-nobigmouth-vulgar-netflix-show-sexualizes-adolescence.
8. See the episode titled ‘Brrap Brrap Pew Pew’ (S3E6) in which a character’s decision to have an abortion
is made a national controversy after a misplaced tweet.

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Falvey 129

Author biography
Eddie Falvey completed his AHRC-funded PhD project on the early films of New York at the University of
Exeter where he taught in the Department of English. Since finishing his PhD, Falvey has been a Lecturer in
Contextual Studies at Plymouth College of Art, specializing in animation. He is the author of an upcoming
volume Re-Animator (Auteur Press), co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection on contemporary horror and
is in the process of preparing an edited collection on the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos. Falvey has chapters
and articles on adaptation and authorship in the films of Spike Jonze, queer fandoms and body horror both in
print and forthcoming. He is currently working on developing his thesis into a monograph for the University
of Amsterdam Press.