The Horsin’ Around Years

I was scrolling through Netflix one afternoon, caught in that same cycle where nothing looks decent, and I wasn’t about to watch Family Guy for the 97th time. Then I saw BoJack Horseman.

A horse was the star of a 90s sitcom called Horsin’ Around. Twenty years later he’s a washed-up drunk living in a Hollywood villa with his unemployed roommate, trying to write his memoir. Will Arnett voices him with this exhausted flatness that’s perfect—the voice of someone who’s run out of anything interesting to say about himself.

The premise could play as full cartoon absurdity, but it doesn’t. Instead it becomes this sharp, ugly comedy about Hollywood eating its own. About being famous and then not being famous. About the specific cruelty of that transition, the panic when you realize you peaked at thirty and everything after that is management.

Diane’s his ghostwriter, which is the smartest setup for the whole thing—she’s trying to make sense of his chaos from the outside, same as we are. Aaron Paul plays Todd, this genuinely good-natured guy who somehow stays functional while everyone around him burns through substances and bad decisions. Watching him navigate that wreckage is half comedy, half just anthropology.

The show doesn’t perform its darkness. No strings, no soundtrack swells. Just the daily, unglamorous reality of desperation. The panic. The drinking. The clinging to relevance that’s already gone. I went in expecting a gimmick show and found something that actually understood the texture of failure.