WHY YOU SHOULD EMBRACE YOUR CREATIVE DARK SIDE

RAPHAEL BOB-WAKSBERG TAPPED A DARK VEIN TO CREATE THE HILARIOUS TITLE CHARACTER OF BOJACK HORSEMAN, A SELF-DESTRUCTIVE TALKING HORSE.

BY KC IFEANYI

Ever since college, Raphael Bob-Waksberg has been searching for a sense of creative balance.

As a playwriting major at Bard College, Bob-Waksberg dove into dramas but was buoyed by humor as a member of the sketch comedy group Olde English. He never valued one over the other. Bob-Waksberg wanted to bridge the two art forms together into something more nuanced than a drama that’s occasionally funny or a comedy with hints of gravitas. What he’s been chasing instead is work that’s grounded in the bleak, yet truthful, depths of raw emotions, amplified against the backdrop of an inherently lighthearted universe.

And Bob-Waksberg found his place in the form of a washed-up, self-destructive cartoon horse.

“I was doing this really wacky sketch comedy but at the same time writing these dark, cerebral plays about characters coming to grips with their loneliness and heartbreak. My dream job has always been a way to combine the two,” Bob-Waksberg says. “I would say BoJack Horseman is the culmination of all of that.”

BoJack Horseman centers on its titular character, the former '90s sitcom star of the fictional hit Horsin’ Around. With fame long behind him, BoJack (Will Arnett) is trying to navigate his way back to relevance with his burnout roommate Todd (Aaron Paul), agent/on-again-off-again girlfriend Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), frenemy Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins), and his biography ghostwriter Diane (Alison Brie), who are all along for a ride punctuated with barely suppressed inner demons and torrents of booze.

As a Netflix original show, all 12 episodes of season one were released at once, and the binge-watching format helped frame Bob-Waksberg’s vision for a reality where humans coexist with anthropomorphic animals. Because Bob-Waksberg knew audiences would watch BoJack Horseman episodes in chunks, he was able to create a tightness and continuity you don’t see in many cartoons: If something changes or is destroyed (like the "HOLLYWOOD sign losing its “D”) it stays that way (welcome to “HOLLYWOO”).

Bob-Waksberg recently talked to Fast Company about the evolution of cartoons, tempering serious with silliness, and his creative process.

HOW DOES THE BINGE-WATCHING FORMAT AND FOCUS ON CONTINUITY HELP YOUR CONCEPT OF THE SHOW?

The idea is that these actions have consequences, these characters grow and change, these relationships shift. By the end of the season, you couldn’t do an episode two again--that story couldn’t happen in this new world. We’re working on season two right now and we have to start over a little bit. The characters have changed; the setting is different; how they look at the world is altered.