4x02 The Old Sugarman Place

[7.6/10] Oh BoJack. I always love the ambition of this show. It takes chances and comes up with unorthodox ways to tell stories that, of all things, put it in the company of shows like How I Met Your Mother that often found sideways methods to make their points. I love the conceit of this one, with BoJack living in his family’s old summer home and fixing it up with a helpful neighbor while the ghosts of his mother and grandparents’ trauma flit in the same space.

There’s a central idea here -- the way that the loss of people we care about messes us up, leaves us unstable and unhappy in a way that we can pass on, that make us hurt people we care about because the grief is overwhelming and sometimes the ways we or others try to fix it only hurt more.

And it leads to a wonderful moment of synchronicity, where BoJack’s dragonfly neighbor sings at a local outdoor spot while unknowingly harmonizing with BoJack’s grandmother in the past, each reflecting on the person they’ve lost, each finding a respite from their pain. It speaks to the connections between past and present, to the universality of grief, and makes for a fitting high point to the parallelism between BoJack’s current predicament at the summer home and his family’s issues there decades earlier.

But man, BoJack is the sort of show that just has to elbow you in the ribs and say “DO YOU GET IT?” for both comedy and drama. Its emotions are always so loud, its themes always so heavy-handed. It tries to shortcircuit the issues there by having its characters wryly wink at what it’s doing (see: BoJack calling out the dragonfly’s dead wife issues before they come to the fore), but it’s still just so damn blunt.

Hell, the last part of this one feels like a Lifetime movie. The reveal that BoJack’s grandmother had a lobotomy is too much (man). Yes, these things really happened, but it’s too perfectly tragic a conclusion to her already rushed, grief-fueled escapades here. The same goes for the Dragonfly recreating the flight that got his wife killed and declaring “I don’t want to live.” It just doesn’t feel real -- it feels over the top. The idea of art is to provoke an emotion, but when you can feel the show trying to push your buttons so obviously, it just doesn’t click.

BoJack can be powerful. Its S3 endgame is striking in how much it achieves with those dramatic moments, but this one feels like its drowning in those obvious attempts at drama and sadness without really earning them, giving us tropes instead of truth, which aren’t softened by the show calling itself out for that. There’s still a lot of good stuff in this one, and again, I really like the conceit, but where they go with it is just too far too fast.