When Netflix announced yesterday—via a new trailer, full of all the self-deprecating wit, blatant denial, and mostly-funny ennui that fans have come to expect from television’s best show about a very sad horse—that BoJack Horseman would be ending with its upcoming bifurcated sixth season, the general assumption was that the decision was, if not entirely coming down from the show’s creative team, then, at least, mutual. After all, the show’s fifth season ended on a note of its titular drunken equine asshole maybe finally coming to terms with the hard work of being a slightly better person—even if the trailer showed the rest of the people in his life in various states of freefall. And while BoJack has played that “Getting better?” card before, it still felt like a natural turning point toward some kind of organic ending on the part of the show’s creators, an indication that they were thinking about finding a stopping point for all this Horsin’ Around.
But while that may or may not have been the decision the show’s writers would have reached on their own, it also sounds like it ultimately wasn’t their call to make—at least according to a tweet posted yesterday by series star and executive producer Aaron Paul. In the tweet, Paul doesn’t seem to necessarily begrudge his El Camino partners for giving this very strange, wonderful show a home for six years, but he’s also pretty unequivocal about the fact that there was “Nothing we could do about it” when Netflix made the call. According to Paul, this was a one-sided decision: Netflix canceled BoJack. Meanwhile, no one else on the show’s producing team—including series star Will Arnett, and creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg—has commented on where the decision to end the series came from. (Aaron Long, one of the show’s directors, tweeted yesterday “Don’t worry, it’s the last season on purpose!”)
Netflix has picked up a, let’s say, reputation in recent years for its willingness to be a bit heavy-handed when it hands out cancellation orders—including the decision to kill off BoJack designer Lisa Hanawalt’s delightful Tuca & Bertie after only a single season on the air. BoJack itself is something of an outlier in that regard; as the fourth original series the streaming service ever debuted (after Hemlock Grove, House Of Cards, and Orange Is The New Black), it’s now Netflix’s longest running extant series, and will remain such until it posts its final batch of eight episodes next January (after debuting the first eight of the season next month). That being said, there is a weird additional business side to all this; BoJack arrived on Netflix back before the streamer realized how key exclusivity was to maintaining its hold on people’s entertainment dollars, and its contracts reflected that; that’s how it became the only series to ever break out of the service and into syndication (on Comedy Central), and while this is all just speculation, we can’t imagine someone at the company wasn’t at least a little happy to patch that hole.
Anyway, given how well the show’s newest trailer laid down a sense of conclusions being approached—if not actually reached—we’re optimistic that, regardless of whoever made it, the decision to end BoJack doesn’t seem to have caught Bob-Waksberg and his team off-guard. (Despite the notoriously long lead times required by animation.) Ending or not, BoJack is one of Netflix’s most critically beloved, Emmy-nominated shows, and it’s hard to imagine that the streaming service would get in its own self-sabotaging way by screwing up its efforts to stick the landing. After all, what kind of stupid piece of shit would do that?
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My love for Bojack Horseman is vast and infinite, but really now, how much longer can the show go for? The show has never for a second hit a bad creative patch, but the entire premise doesn’t allow for Bojack to ever achieve happiness, so another, often far worse breakdown is always waiting. As I said, I love this show to pieces, but giving it a proper ending after 6 seasons feels natural. As long as they pull off season 6, we can safely look back on the show and say “Hey, they made a brilliant show that never went on too long”There’s something always awful about loving a show deeply that goes too long and falls apart. As long as Bojack gets a proper ending, six seasons is enough.
I haven’t seen Tuca & Bertie or Undone yet, but based on the ecstatic critical responses those shows got, the creative team of Bojack is going to have plenty more amazing television to deliver even after the conclusion.
6 seasons (and a movie! maybe) is usually the magic amount of seasons warranted for a good show. After that it feels like they’re just dragging the characters back through things they’ve already done.
I think four seasons (one to test and introduce, two for the main storyline, and then a final season to wrap up) is the perfect length for most show premises but the occasional excellent one can go for a bit longer.It’s rare however a show to do that without large amounts of re-invention.
4-6 is the sweetspot for serialized shows, but non-serialized shows can go on much longer. Granted, something like 20+ seasons for the Simpsons is just a cruel joke.
Without giving too much away, Undone honestly feels like it would work best if it ended with just the one season. It’s all about uncertainty about what exactly is going on, and another season would probably just force it to give a bunch of solid answers and ruin that.
Undone was basically a movie. there’s no need for a sequel.
The last season kinda spun it’s wheels in the beginning but the rehab thing was a good way to end the season. I really do hope the show ends on a happy note because it got really dark sometimes and it was exhausting to watch at times
As I put it to a friend when describing the show, “When I watch Bojack Horseman, sometimes the stupid animal jokes and puns make me want to kill myself, and sometimes they are the only thing keeping me from killing myself.”
Bojack is one of my favorite shows of all time. Tuca and Bertie annoyed me to the point that I turned it off halfway through the season. (still watching Undone!)
I agree. I’m ok with this decision. BoJack had a good run and never wore out its welcome. If NetFlix decides to bring the team back for a BoJack movie sometime down the road, I’d be ok with that too.I also have not seen Tuca & Bertie but I can tell you, Undone was pretty phenomenal. I burned through that in a weekend. I highly recommend.
I agree. I’m ok with this decision. BoJack had a good run and never wore out its welcome. If NetFlix decides to bring the team back for a BoJack movie sometime down the road, I’d be ok with that too.I also have not seen Tuca & Bertie but I can tell you, Undone was pretty phenomenal. I burned through that in a weekend. I highly recommend.
I’d much rather a show go out on top than spin its wheels.
yup, this is one of my favourite shows of all time but even I started to feel a bit of fatigue in S5, despite as always some moments that were up there with the show’s best. good choice to go out while still on top (and give us more shows like Undone, RBW and Kate Purdy!)
Undone is a fucking masterpiece. I can’t wait to see what this creative team continues to come up with.
But I thought that, since the show is a Tornante production and not produced by Netflix, they could market it somewhere else if they wanted to? Was the unionization a factor? Maybe they just thought about it after Netflix cancelled they made a decision that they told the story they wanted? I have to imagine someplace else would pick it up if they wanted to keep going. (Comedy Central? Adult Swim? Maybe FX to go with Archer?) I would watch it if they decided to keep going but I also think it’s probably a fine place to stop.
I think they probably decided they would rather end the story on a creatively strong note then exercise the time and money required to ship the show to other networks, potentially cutting off or confusing viewers used to getting the show on Netflix first and foremost. It definitely seems like they are being given the time and respect from Netflix to bring the story to a satisfying end, and after six seasons of great tv I think I’m ok with that and they’re ok with that too
what the fuck is up with netflix? first tuca and bertie, and now this? i’m almost of a mind to ask my mom to cancel our subscription
I wondered what was up when they killed Tuca & Bertie. It’s so closely related to Bojack, a Netflix flagship, that it should have been born with enough clout to get an automatic second season. Now it all makes more sense. The two shows were almost certainly cancelled together, and we’re just now catching up.
Someone on Twitter reminded everyone that Tuca and Bojack’s animators all unionized several months ago. Maybe related??
Absolutely related and what I scrolled down to say. This is all about the unionization and a lot of folks called it the second that went down. Fuck Netflix.
That’s how it goes. You want higher union wages it makes the company decide they’re better off paying you no wages.
But Bojack was developed as is owned by the Tornante Co., which is run by Michael Eisner. So, I’m not sure the were cancelled for similar reasons.
Netflix’s programming decisions are pretty much run by algorithm. I think that kind of dispassionate number crunching ended T&B because it wasn’t an instant success. It was a little too weird for a lot of Netflix payers (payers, not watchers).
Netflix has to learn they aren’t the only horse in the race anymore. I have like 4 services that all have tons of showd getting added all the time. The rate at which I binge something shouldn’t matter. Sophie’s choice is hard.
Tuca and Bertie was just not as accessible to the average joe/public as Bojack is. T&C was a good show but it was too esoteric and weird for average joe/public to take, and Netflix, under pressure from its shareholders to perform, saw the low numbers/profitability and axed it before giving it a chance.
I think the issue with Tuca and Bertie wasn’t so much the weirdness as it was being so closely related to BoJack in the first place. It’s hard to see much of an audience going for Tuca & Bertie that wasn’t already watching BoJack – you’re almost inherently working with a subset of a subset of the Netflix subscriber base. It didn’t really get widely hyped until after the fact; I think a lot of people probably brushed past it as “oh, BoJack for girls”, as fucked as that is. Maybe a better media hyper campaign to start with could have changed things.
The only thing Tuca had in common with BoJack is the animation. Otherwise, they don’t really have much in common. Bojack at its core is a comedy/satire of celebrity culture and Hollywood and thats something average joe/public will better watch and understand than Tuca, which was a more esoteric, raunchier, and adult version of Broad City which only a certain niche demographic got into. And as I said before, heavily in debt Netflix is really under the gun from investors and shareholders to perform now so it isn’t as patient or risk taking like before. It doesn’t have the budget to heavily market experimental shows like this or have the time and patience to see it through.
I know quite a few people who watched Tuca & Bertie but don’t watch BoJack, so I don’t think your subset of a subset theory is accurate. Ali Wong and Tiffany Haddish are each having enough of a moment right now that they’d draw in their own fans who aren’t in the BoJack crowd, although there’s probably some overlap. The weirdness and perhaps getting written off as a show that’s just for women are more likely reasons for its cancellation to me.
Its not like T&C was some ingenious show that your average drooling slob just wasn’t equipped to understand. It was manic and abrasive and quite frankly hard to watch. I could have seen myself enjoying it if they dialed it back a few points.
Maybe that’s part of it, but I also think the simple truth is nobody watched Tuca and Bertie. Not literally no one, of course, but I, a huge Bojack fan, never watched it, and there seem to be many other Bojack fans in this comment section saying they never watched it either. I have no idea why, but it seems like the show never found a good audience, and I bet if we could see Netflix’s viewership numbers for the show we’d understand better why it was cancelled.
Or rather not enough people watched it to justify Netflix spending any more money on it. A lot of people commenting here don’t seem to realize how much in trouble financially Netflix is now thats about to get a whole lot worse once Disney+ goes live. They just can’t be as patient and risk taking anymore like they used to be.
Maybe it was all the exposition, kind of necessary for a pilot, or the voice actors not being super comfortable in their roles, also understandable, but I couldn’t make it through the first episode. Felt like a first script reading between Haddish and Wong that a very good animator did the best they could with. I may try it again and just skip that episode, I think I got the setup.
Netflix to unveil new slogan, ‘Netflix: Everything You Love Shall End!’
Some of the executives at NetFlix pretty much all but admitted that they produce new shows with the intent of only running for a season or two to bring in new subscribers and then move on.
I admit I don’t have a business degree, but making shows for only new subscribers while telling current subscribers to go fuck themselves doesn’t sound like a good strategy…
Are you going to quit NetFlix over this? They’re banking on having a steady stream of new movies and shows to both bring in new subscribers and keep old ones.Yes, it is a good business strategy, if not dickish, because noone is going to quit NetFlix because they canceled one show.
Amazon Prime even moreso because Prime offers more than just movies and shows.
as a business decision seems a gamble to me, as they have to find a new show to hook them on to keep them around.
No, but cancellations add up and I’ll probably use it less. Subscriptions aren’t yearly, so I might get for a month or two and then drop it for a month or two. It’s not an either/or proposition.And if they get a reputation for cancelling shows, why would I ever watch one of their new originals if I don’t believe it’ll make it. There’s a limit on how much you can pull a bait and switch.
Netflix are entitled to cancel any show that they think is no longer worth the investment. i guess they are the only ones who have the viewing numbers though so their decision making is open to more conjecture than when the networks do it.
6 seasons with a proper ending is far more than a lot of shows get.
I think this is because Netflix doesn’t own all the rights to the show. It was developed through Michael Eisner’s Tornante production company. That’s why they were able to syndicate BoJack on Comedy Central.
How are the those Bojack re-runs? They must be chopped up to hell to fit in commercials and such.Also it feels weird using “re-runs” in regards to a streaming production.
Yeah, the whole situation is weird. I’m not sure how they work on CC.
It does gove me hope that CC could continue it like they did Futurama
Sometimes it’s a weird spot, but for the most part it’s pretty good. The shitty thing is that they replay any time after 1 AM (I got rid of Netflix (money issues on my end) but I still have a DVR & cable so I set it up to record but it’s still insane that it’s on at between 2 – 3:15 AM
Six is considered a ‘magic number’ in the TV business. Usually, after the 6th year its time to renegotiate contracts. The actors and production people expect a big raise, the networks want to keep spending down‘til they’ve amortized the up-front costs of producing the series in the first place. it boils down to a numbers game. What was that slogan on the series ‘Community’? “Six seasons and a movie!”
I heard the season 6 thing you mentioned was partly why AMC pulled the move of splitting Breaking Bad’s final run over 2 years. That way AMC got what was essentially a season 5 and 6, but they could class it all as one big season 5. The vital thing with Bojack is they’re giving it a proper finale. I would be upset if Netflix yanked out the plug mid-narrative.
That season split thing is gross. Big studios gonna big studio.
This is one of those cases where ending the show does make sense, but it also makes me wonder even more what Netflix’s future for original programming is going to be. They are increasingly cookie cutter and are drowning in red ink.
I mean at this rate it has me not wanting to watch and get invested in any future Netflix original because I know they’ll jusy cancel it early
Six seasons and a movie?
I mean, Raphael Bob-Waksberg has always said that they’d keep making Bojack for as long as Netflix let them, so its not like this cancellation interrupts some grand plan they had mapped out. This was always gonna happen at some point, i just hope they can stick the landing. Narrative series shouldn’t go on forever.
If Mindhunter doesn’t get a third season…!!!
Smart of them to get rid of all the reasons to subscribe to Netflix when the streaming wars have them in bad shape.
This. It perhaps makes narrative sense for rehab to be the final arc, but Netflix can go fuck themselves – as in, they can continue what they’ve been doing lately anyway.
6 seasons is a good long run. I don’t know exactly what went on behind the scenes, but I think having 6 good seasons of a show is far better than having tons of crap.
Neither this article nor the Tuca and Bertie cancellation one reference the fact the the animators for these shows unionized over the summer. I imagine that it must have factored in to Netflix’s decision.https://news.avclub.com/bojack-animators-utilize-their-collective-horse-power-1835767667
I’d wager it’s more to do with how Netflix works now. New seasons of old shows don’t register in the consciousness as much as new content does unless it’s a major hit. Bojack was from before Netflix started their unofficial “two and out” policy, if it was released today, it never would have made it to season 3, union or no union.
But thats also because they oversaturate with ads for the new showd and not the older ones
They’re not Netflix employees though. Why would it matter to Netflix? They pay X to another company. Makes no difference how that company is organized.
Union workers get union wages my dude
Plus, the film and television industry is heavily unionized anyway. I’m sure some producers are pissed off about the animators organizing, but they’re probably in the minority.
Damn it.
“[T]elevision’s best show about a very sad horse”.At least until the gritty reboot of ‘Mr Ed’ hits the screens.
Sooooo… Probably not the place to giggle at the grief of fans? Cuz I found the show not nearly up to its hype?HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA and also sorry. You love a thing I think is just barely okay. I shouldn’t be a jerk.(hehehe… *snicker*)
It’s very hard to hear your mockery over 6 seasons of inventive television and a properly mapped out final season. Please try to speak louder next time.
IS THIS LOUD ENOUGH? THE SHOW WAS SHIT MATE, IT’S BEING CANCELLED BECAUSE THE HIPSTER FURRIES ARE ALL DOING SOMETHING ELSE. PROBABLY.
I’m totally joking by the way, no actual offence meant. I do wonder about the whole “a properly mapped out final season” business though. How do we actually know how properly mapped out it is if it isn’t out yet?
I know we can look to their past work as an example, but I’d be wary of making such a sweeping statement on the quality of a show that is as yet, unbroadcasted.
I don’t know how long the lead time is, but one can only assume that since the final lot of episodes doesn’t arrive until January that they have ample time to make this a proper ending.I’m happy it went so long, but with a couple of tweaks, season 3, 4 or 5 could have been the ending if it actually became an emergency cancellation. I personally see the glass half-full and until I hear otherwise I’m assuming this was a mutual decison. Aaron Paul is the only one to suggest cancellation and no one else involved on the show has said anything about that. As for any criticisms people may have for the show, it’s very tough to argue that a show that went for 6 years and is receiving a peaceful finale didn’t find a dedicated audience for good reason.
You don’t even know what those criticisms are. How can you respond to them, particularly with “Well, lots of people liked it.”?It was troll of me to post what I did. It’s not like the Bojack fandom is gonna stop worshipping it once it’s over. I’m still gonna have to listen to them natter on about it. But to your point, it got 6 seasons. It is pretty well loved. Let me have my jerk moment.
A fair smack. And crazily enough it didn’t require talking about a dead dog! (Miss Two Sense could learn a lesson here.)
I can’t WAIT to be around when your dog dies. Tee hee snicker snicker giggle giggle.
Yes, I know those things aren’t of equal value. BUT- you actually clicked on an article about a topic you don’t care about, read it, and took the time to write a whole post about it just to be mean to complete strangers for no reason about something that doesn’t even matter anyway.
You’ve got it coming, edgelord.
Was that actually “edgelord” behavior? It was more like troll behavior really.Don’t take it personally. I would say the same thing about Rick and Morty. Or Tim and Eric. Or It’s Always Sunny. Or the entire output of Jody Hill. I find plenty of contemporary comedy idols overhyped.
Stupid piece of shit!
“After all, the show’s fifth season ended on a note of its titular drunken equine asshole maybe finally coming to terms with the hard work of being a slightly better person”All of the seasons end on that note.
Eh, not really. BoJack learns incremental lessons every season, but only the fifth one ends with him properly going into something that he HAS to and wants to do to feel better.None of the things he does before going to rehab are things he wants to do or should do – he does them because he thinks of himself as a TV character and they are all Big Things that he identifies as milestones. He doesn’t do Philbert because he wants to, but because of a sense of obligation. Season 5 ends powerfully because going to rehab is a sad anti-climax for an attention whore like BoJack Horseman – but it’s the right thing to do and he comes forward with the initiative.
The splitting of the season is clearly to give subscribers a reason to stay subscribed after Disney+ launches. I think if Disney+ wasn’t lurking around the corner season 6 would be out already.
gee what a coincedence. a show has it’s workers unionize, and the corporate fucks cancel it.
I’m guessing it’s because the animators pushed for union wages. They deserve them but that’s business.
Being given a final season to wrap things up — and that season being the sixth — seems plenty generous. Oh how I wish Santa Clarita Diet had been extended the same courtesy.
That’s (not) too much, man!