Raphael Bob-Waks­berg on what to expect from BoJack Horse­man sea­son four

BoJack Horse­man (Will Arnett) is ready to end his life but stops at the sight of hors­es run­ning wild as Nina Simone’s ​‘Stars’ plays. This is the beau­ti­ful final moment that closed out BoJack Horse­man sea­son three. The show’s cre­ator, Raphael Bob-Waks­berg, tells LWLies that there will be a pay­off in the upcom­ing fourth sea­son. ​“You will see the imme­di­ate after­math of that scene,” he says. ​“We’re not going to come back, say, three years lat­er and no one is ever going to talk about it again. There are last­ing ram­i­fi­ca­tions to what we saw at the end of sea­son three and we use that as our start­ing point.”

Last sea­son left BoJack at a cross­roads, hav­ing ruined his best chance at being con­tent with his life in the shad­ow of fame – again – and fac­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that he might have a teenage daugh­ter. The show start­ed out as a dark com­e­dy about a celebri­ty horse who strug­gles with match­ing the suc­cess of his pop­u­lar ​’90s sit­com, Horsin’ Around. It’s full of puns, visu­al gags and absurd jokes about Hol­ly­wood. But over the course of three sea­sons, BoJack Horse­man began to dig deep­er in its con­tem­pla­tion of depres­sion in the shad­ow of suc­cess. If a car­toon celebri­ty horse can’t find hap­pi­ness, can anyone?

Bob-Waks­berg reveals that he is con­stant­ly blown away by the dif­fer­ent ways fans inter­pret the show. ​“We leave enough ambi­gu­i­ty and we try to make it as rich and as well realised as we can with enough space to breathe so peo­ple can get their own stuff out of it. What you are when you went through the machine affects what you are when you come out of the machine.” An emo­tion­al ambush occurs with BoJack Horse­man because you nev­er expect an ani­mat­ed show to be so pro­found. ​“It makes you more vul­ner­a­ble and open to things,” Bob-Waks­berg says. ​“I think it turns off the part of your brain that over-analy­ses things or finds faults or nit­picks. When you enter that spir­it you go with the emo­tions and we take you to very dark places.”

It’s a mar­vel that a show like BoJack Horse­man is now enter­ing its fourth sea­son, and Bob-Waks­berg believes its suc­cess owes a lot to the con­tin­ued sup­port of Net­flix. ​“BoJack Horse­man would have been can­celled in the mid­dle of its first sea­son of broad­cast tele­vi­sion. It would have nev­er been able to play out its ini­tial sea­son arc if it was on a tra­di­tion­al net­work at any oth­er time oth­er than right now. Even right now, I don’t think it would have last­ed if not for the Net­flix mod­el of watch­ing all the episodes and you binge through it, and even if you’re not into it a first, you keep going and dis­cov­er how much you like it.”

BoJack Horse­man has opened doors for Bob-Waks­berg, who worked on the script for The Lego Movie Sequel, but he laughs off the sug­ges­tion that his life could start to mir­ror BoJack Horse­man. ​“Maybe I’m naïve. I feel very secure in myself and my life. If I nev­er make a show as good or as pop­u­lar as BoJack Horse­man, that’s okay, I’ll do oth­er things. I don’t tie my own ego to my suc­cess in my career. There’s a dan­ger that BoJack Horse­man could become my own Horsin’ Around, the first line in my obit­u­ary will be the thing I’m most known for but I’m not haunt­ed by that.”

To stay ground­ed, Bob-Waks­berg takes inspi­ra­tion from Aaron Paul, who voic­es Todd, ​“He’s some­one who is very con­nect­ed with one char­ac­ter, Jesse Pinkman [on Break­ing Bad], and is aware that is going to be what he is for the rest of his life. He’ll play oth­er parts and oth­er roles that are as big, or might not, but he is very com­fort­able with peo­ple, still, after the show has end­ed, com­ing up and telling him how much they love Break­ing Bad, and he loves it too and is very proud of it. If Jesse Pinkman can deal with peo­ple yelling out ​‘hey, bitch’ at him every­where he goes and keep a smile, and gen­uine­ly enjoy and love it, I think there’s hope for all of us.”

BoJack Horse­man arrived a year after Net­flix launched their assault on the tele­vi­sion indus­try, and Bob-Waks­berg thinks this dis­rup­tion to the sta­tus quo has been a nec­es­sary one. ​“You have some peo­ple com­plain­ing now that there is too much TV or that we’re at peak TV, it’s unsus­tain­able, and in some ways I under­stand those con­cerns but I think if you are used to watch­ing every­thing, like if you’re a TV crit­ic, then you need to change the way you work because it’s just not fea­si­ble any­more. But I don’t think there is any­one that would say ​‘there’s too much music this year’ or ​‘there’s too many books’. Yes, there is a lot of some­thing but that just means there’s more for everybody.”

He con­tin­ues, ​“The more TV shows there are, the more voic­es that can speak, the more showrun­ners you have. I’d love to see more women of colour run­ning shows, more trans­gen­der peo­ple run­ning shows, more women in gen­er­al. But I think there are so many more inter­est­ing sto­ries to uncov­er and I’m very excit­ed to see what hap­pens there and Net­flix has been at the fore­front of that as part of a larg­er trend, which on the whole is a good thing.”

Net­flix haven’t com­mit­ted to a fifth sea­son of BoJack Horse­man yet, and if the third sea­son cliffhang­er is any indi­ca­tion, the fourth could be just as vague. Then again, per­haps BoJack’s path to accept­ing his place in the world has only just begun.

BoJack Horse­man sea­son four is on Net­flix from 8 Sep­tem­ber, 2017.