Diane asks if Chicago is her kind of town on a “Feel-Good Episode” of BoJack Horseman
TV Reviews BoJack Horseman
In the first two episodes of BoJack Horseman, there’s been a conspicuous lack of Diane Nguyen. She’s still been a part of the story, roped into BoJack’s search for Jameson and throwing Princess Carolyn baby name suggestions, but those all interactions took place over the phone and with the implication that she was a long way from Hollywoo at the time. It’s all the more noticeable as Diane is coming off her best season, a season that took her to Vietnam and back in a desperate search for meaning, a season that forced her to question the path of her career and end of her marriage, and a season that made her truly reckon with just what it meant to be friends with BoJack Horseman.
With “Feel-Good Episode,” we get our explanation of where she’s been—and also face the possibility that this arrangement could become more permanent. Season six is fast shaping up to be the season of moving forward, setting each of its main characters on a new path for their lives that may not have a lot of resemblance to their old ones. Even though the methods they use to get there are less elegant than they could be, it does its job of getting Diane to a point where she realizes just how little there is keeping her from jettisoning her old life to start a new one.
“Feel-Good Episode” lets us know right away that the reason we haven’t seen Diane is the same reason a lot of characters disappear from BoJack’s ecosystem: she’s actually happy. GirlCroosh’s pivot to video (ugh) means that Diane gets to be on the road, filming a series of expose videos that allow her to wage social justice in the name of getting clicks. She’s even got a new relationship with her cameraman Guy (Lakeith Stanfield of Atlanta and Sorry To Bother You), who’s able to debate politics and woo her with fake keycard mixups. It extends the positive feeling of the last time we saw her at the end of “The Stopped Show,” where it felt like she was leaving BoJack on his next step and off to one of her own.
If she’s in her element to start, she’s thrown into one much colder when Guy takes a week to handle some business in Chicago: “the Second Windy Muddy Big Shoulder City by the Lake.” It’s always fun to see what the BoJack Horseman team does with a different setting, and the production designers do a great job of capturing the feeling of Chicago in the various shots. Some of the jokes are obvious ones, such as knocking the thinness of New York pizza, and bears and bulls in their respective team jerseys walking outside Portillo’s stand-in Parmadillo’s. And then there’s the abject brilliance of the Chicago Baby Humans game, its mascot “stumbling around like the furless, featherless dolt he is.” Simultaneously a perfect translation of this human/animal world, and thinly veiled shade against racist mascots, it’s a rare gag where I had to take a moment to collect myself afterwards.
Those jokes were at least easier to swallow than seeing Stefani accept an offer to sell GirlCroosh to international conglomerate Whitewhale, absorbing it into a Fuddruckers/Dow Chemical-funded, Univision-based, Gizmodo-branded ‘mist’ of advertorial. While the monetization of Internet media is definitely worth calling attention to (and not at all a plot that’s too close to home, why would you say something like that, that’s just crazy talk) there’s a broadness to this that doesn’t measure up to similar societal commentary from the show. Case in point, Jeremiah Whitewhale himself: Stephen Root is a national treasure and it’s a joy to welcome him into the BoJack Horseman family, but he’s only missing a monocle and top hat to be more of a robber baron caricature. BoJack can often go broad and make it work, here it doesn’t click.
That feeds into the main weakness of “Feel-Good Episode,” in that despite some good caper vibes as Diane and Guy try to dig up some dirt on Whitewhale, that part of the episode never gets off the ground. Compared to Diane’s similar crusade in “Hank After Dark,” it’s missing a social commentary more incisive than “corporations are bad,” or an emotional investment beyond Diane’s general social justice warrior energy. And the episode seems to know it too, as Whitewhale brushes everything away by saying none of it matters legally. There’s of course a chance for legalized murder by the rich to play a part down the road, but in the moment it feels like a lazy satire on our current political hellscape.
But then again, for Diane and Guy—and for the episode at large—it was never really about striking a decisive blow against capitalism. Instead, it’s about their relationship and trying to figure out what if anything it means now that they’re not on the road anymore. All credit goes to Alison Brie and Stanfield for building a likable rapport from the start of the episode, a relationship that feels lived in even though it’s the the viewer’s introduction to it. You can hear the joy they have in spending time with each other, and the tension of arguments that grow more and more familiar the longer they have to think about things that aren’t Whitewhale.
And like any relationship, it’s something simple that manages to blow the whole thing up: Guy buys her a coat to deal with the frigid Chicago winds, and the need for said coat mushrooms into a whole argument. It’s one of the most painful arguments to witness because you can tell where both parties are coming from. Yes, Guy should have figured what boundaries he wanted to draw with Diane and his family and friends before introducing them. And yes, Diane could have just bought a coat herself rather than suffer in silence—the exact same coat he did—but she can’t even make a concession to her own comfort if it means staking a commitment first.
“I don’t know why I should suffer because you have this idealogical objection to feeling good,” Guy says in a moment of frustration, a frustration that does seem to have permeated a lot of the Diane character. An early review of this season by The Spool’s Gena Radcliffe criticized Diane for a “dour self-righteousness that is damn near insufferable,” and while I don’t agree with that I can see some truth in the sentiment. BoJack Horseman has worn Diane down over the last few years, bearing the brunt of the show’s commentary on how society treats women, and it’s made her harsher in the process. Somewhat unfortunately, she’s also the cast member with the most self-awareness of her damage, which she uses to push Guy away in one of Brie’s most heartbreakingly sincere deliveries:
“I feel so shitty all the time, I feel like the whole world is pushing in on me all the time. Except for you. … I can’t be with you if you’re the only good thing in my life. It’s too much pressure. I’m sorry.”
Thankfully, self-awareness cuts both ways, this time helped on by a letter from BoJack in rehab working out his frustrations with the process and Beverly taking his clearly labeled snacks. While the device of those letters is a bit on the nose to convey the theme of Diane’s travails, it does hit home to remind Diane of what the audience already knows. Once upon a time she took a chance to move from Boston to Los Angeles, and while there was a lot of bad things that came out of that there was also some good in it. Why not take that good—even if it’s just the knowledge of the perfect grilled cheese sandwich—to a place where there’s something else good, and take the chance of it being better?
“Feel-Good Story” doesn’t have the same punch as the last Diane spotlight episode “The Dog Days Are Over,” but that’s also because Diane herself isn’t carrying as much baggage as she was at that point. She’s put her marriage with Mr. Peanutbutter to bed, she’s reconciled her relationship with BoJack, and she’s figured out the type of work that makes her feel fulfilled. She’s in a better place than she’s ever been to jump to something new, and set to the gorgeous vocals of Fialta’s “High Above Chicago,” she’s ready to give it a shot.
Stray observations:
- Achievement in Voice Acting: Again, Lakeith Stanfield is fantastic this episode. Grounded and smart enough to match wits with Diane, yet guarded enough to hide how he feels about her behind story pitches and hypotheticals. I’m excited he’s evidently going to be around for a while longer. And it’ll be interesting to see how Diane, who’s always been open about never wanting children, reacts to being introduced to the son who’s clearly very important to him.
- Also in encouraging Diane news, she’s still got a book in her head despite once acknowledging it would never happen: One Last Thing And Then I Swear To God I’ll Shut Up About This Forever: Dispatches From The Front Lines Of The War On Women: Arguments, Opinions, Reflections, Recollections, Razor Text. (“Yeah, I kinda got lost in the middle of it and couldn’t find a way out.”)
- We go from NPR to The New York Times with Michael Barbaro providing Diane’s ringtone this season: “Today, here is what you need to know about people, who still use their phone to call other people.”
- Awfulness of capitalism aside, it is good that WhiteWhale acquired Disney-Fox-AT&T-AOL-Time Warner-PepsiCo-Viacom-Halliburton-Skynet-Toyota-Trader Joes, if only for the sanity of reviewers like myself and our copy editors.
- The pigeons jockeying for position on the statue outside of the Art Institute is a nice touch.
- Diane’s desktop icons: ruffdraft_copy.doc, rbg_ftw.jpg, kai_ryssdal_fanfic.doc. And she still has the same tab open from buying her IKEA furniture out.”)
- Despite hating what the company stands for, Guy is excited to see a new super-expensive skyscraper coming up in Chicago. “In your face, Dubai!”
- “Diane, I love that you still eat sandwiches.”
- “Well, best be quick about it, you unholy apparitions!”
- “Are spirographs the new fidget spinners? The answer eludes me at every turn.”
- “When you put out stories of us being evil or callous or whoever the bad guy in Harry Potter is, people think our business is uncompromised by morality and our stock goes up!”
- “Also, am I crazy, or have I gotten really good at writing letters?”
- Today in Hollywoo signs:
36 Comments
This was another stellar episode but I think the Whitewhale presentation video was an example of Bojack at its worst — extremely self-indulgent. It started off great with the vertical integration and oligopoly caricatures but it dragged on wayyy longer than necessary and quickly came off as preachy. Loved the classic cartoon art style for it though.
Counterpoint: Tom Kenny and Cree Summer! I think this is the first time we’ve had, y’know, career voice actors on the show. Making them play in-universe cartoons is a cute choice.
Get your 90s Nickelodeon fix and remember how terrible the present is.Millenials!
The 90s can be terrible and still have given us some talented folks. (Also Summer started in the 80s and I mostly remember her from a series with a 2002 premiere but go off I guess)
“When you put out stories of us being evil or callous or whoever the bad guy in Harry Potter is, people think our business is uncompromised by morality and our stock goes up!”
I feel like there could have been a lot of ways to make it more cutting, maybe by strongly implying that he would have never given her money if he did have a sense of social morality because he doesn’t see her as someone who actually does anything besides get outrage clicks from people looking for some way to publicly demonstrate their wokeness ferver, as opposed to a journalist or charity (possibly generating a Susan B. Komen reference). Hell, even adding “much better than a journalist, all they do is inform the public” would have been kind of awful.
It doesn’t make a difference whether she’s a “real” journalist or not, the point is that just “exposing” his deeds makes no difference at all – he is happy to confess to murder on tape because he has the power to literally kill people with impunity.
There’s a reason that Lakeith Stanfield is the voice of Guy, the whole plot of the episode is a riff on a certain recent project that he also appeared in (trying not to spoil).
I was waiting for that green line isn’t going to take you to a airport joke to drop. Loving the place Chicago references. That Parmadillos scene made me want a dipped big beef and a chocolate cake shake.
the directed by brad bird credit at the end of the white whale presentation was my biggest laugh of the season so far, tbh.
I assume that’s a reference to his supposed Objectivist streak. Which I actually think is bullshit, but it still works as a gag.
That, or the fact that a bird is an animal.
As we like to say around here, it can be two things.
I loved the last little exchange Bojack gives to Diane – that her staying in LA just to make sure he’s okay “isn’t a friendship, it’s a hostage situation”. They’re both so codependent and unhealthy it was refreshing to see them detangle a little in a way that wasn’t a blowout fight.
Oof, if it were more effective satire, I imagine that one might have hurt, AVC writers.
I did, though, appreciate three good non-deep dish Chicago burns that I assume mean a writer definitely lived there for a moment.
Seriously, I know they are conflating multiple El issues here, but why is there both a south and north Western blueline stop, with no immediate visual differentiation? Why does the greenline go south to both Cottage Grove and Ashland/63rd (and the trains are differentiated only by background color)? And why is it not more clear at downtown blueline stops whether you are going to Forest Park or O’Hare (god knows no one would confuse Jefferson Park – almost at O’Hare – with Forest Park, at the other terminal end of the Blue Line)? You know a fairly large minority of the early morning ridership is just trying to get to O’Hare through sleepy, frosty eyes.
But more importantly, I’m glad someone decided to go after Italian beefs instead of deep dish/stuffed pizza. It’s not that fun either way, but at least they’re trying. FTR, I like Italian beefs and if you have the chance, head way north on the redline and hit up Sam’s Chicken and Ribs for the *Cheesy* Italian beef. It’ll put you into a coma lasting long enough that’ll ensure you don’t need a winter coat.
And this stands alone.
What was Whitewhale’s assistant supposed to be? A type of sea creature sure, but I couldn’t figure out which one.
On the ‘The A.V. Club is recapping Bojack Horseman’ page the link for this review is an email address. This one: [email protected] comments are closed on that page or I would have posted this there.
I’m not sure why the reviewer feels it lacks social commentary beyond corporations are bad… I think the commentary is exactly that: that corporations like amazon feel so big and so omnipresent that they can wield their power extremely bluntly, to a level that is (for want of a better word) cartoonish. It’s also about deciding how to live with that.But then, every one of these Diane-led Bojack Horseman episode about a “social issue” (abortion, guns, sexual harrassment)… they’re not about the issue, they’re about the media’s response to that issue, which is very a different thing, and it’s genuinely scary how often people confuse the two (not that this review is doing that). All of those episodes are about Diane getting worn down trying to do what she believes to be “the right thing” (and one of the things I love about Diane as a character is that she is often wrong or at least conflicted, like in the abortion episode when she realises her objections to Awkwafina’s abortion song might be misguided). And in every one of those eps, her opponents are able to silence her (I can’t remember what happens in the gun control one, haven’t reawatched it) but it’s also about the exhaustion of being one person who is up against these huge organisations. So it makes sense that all of her attempts at “crusades” lead to one place, and that it’s called White Whale. And of course, they own the corporate conglomerate that we saw cancelling the Manatee Fair story in the Hank Hippopotamus episode and of course they own the news channel that did the all-male abortion panel in that ep. I think so much of your reaction to this political stuff depends on how you view the role of the press and how much power journalists have to effect change, and this episode ultimately seems to have sympathies with a certain other Lakeith Stanfield project which referenced similar things (I loved that movie, others may not, fine). I don’t think this episode is trying to be particularly satirical, but then, I think it’s suggesting that satire is relatively ineffective. The writers of Bojack Horseman are, after all, just writers and media producers like Diane and Guy, so I think they’re channelling a lot of their own feelings of powerlessness and exhaustion. Journalists have already revealed that workers at amazon fulfilment centres have died on the job and suffered other forms of physical and emotional harm. This doesn’t dissuade many people from shopping there. If they had exposed the whale guy being a murderer, what would have changed so long as he had money? Maybe some people will find it too explicitly left wing, which I suppose I understand, but would a scene where someone orders something from White Whale and gets great customer service really have helped?
Anyway, I did not intend to write this much, I am 100% a long time AV Club reader and first time comment writer, but every episode this series has made me cry. I also loved where they met in the under-construction building with the plastic tarpaulins flapping in the wind, that was hauntingly gorgeous and I think the animating team have stepped it up several notches this series.
Sat what you will about the social commentary but WhiteWhale murdering the employee over “taking bathroom breaks and encouraging the other employee to take bathroom breaks as well” seems like a direct dig at Amazon. Amazon’s warehouses are known to prioritize efficiency to a extreme degree, and many employees can’t take bathroom breaks or they will miss their daily quotas. But I suppose it could just be cliche capitalist villain talk as well.
The entire dead warehouse employee bit is a direct Amazon reference. A man actually died at an Amazon warehouse and his body was left there unfound for awhile due to the workload. Short of Jeff Bezos literally murdering said employee everything Diane and Guy investigated in this episode about that incident actually happened under Amazon’s watch.In general I found that whole section really brilliant. Maybe not as insightful or emotionally complex as previous examples of social commentary on the show, but just as satisfying in a different way. The whole “Billionaires are allowed to murder now” scene is probably the funniest bit of social commentary I’ve seen from this show, even if it’s not the deepest.
I’m always mixed on the Diane-centric episodes, because I think she’s one of the best characters on the show and has so much potential to be both funny and emotionally devastating in the same way as Bojack, but the writers tend to centre episodes around a ‘topical issue’ every time which doesn’t give the character time to just have her own experiences. when the issue episodes are as good as “Brrap Brrap Pew Pew” and “Hank After Dark” it wasn’t a problem, but since then it’s felt a bit like they’re not quite sure how to live up to the mix of character drama and social commentary in those excellent episodes.I still enjoyed this a lot, Brie and Lakeith Stanfield interacting was an absolute delight, but as the review pointed out the social commentary fell pretty flat in comparison to the lovely, understated relationship moments.
I agree, but I think (or hope) the “flatness” of this episode is actually the point itself. Diane goes off on these somewhat self-righteous wars against the social topic du jour as a social warrior because it’s gritty and exciting and temporarily makes her feel useful and fuffilled. But the real reason she’s doing it is to distract from the lack of direction and purpose she feels in her life. Real life is just… bland. No grand gestures, no crazy adventure plotlines (once you hit 30 I guess). Just jackets and sandwiches and awkward arguments about nothing. And that constant feeling that you should be doing something right now, something important – but you can never quite figure out what.
That the journalist Diane meets up with is unable to identify Jeremiah Whitewhale as her “white whale” is one of my favourite joke types.
“Read a book!”
That journalist has a name. . . Call her Isabel.
Say what you will about BoJack, but on some level he understands, and the show understands, just what an awful person he is. Something about that makes him more tolerable a character than Diane (or Mr. Peanutbutter).
I refuse to stand for Diane being called awful. Mr. Peanutbutter yes. But Diane is just very human and flawed, and the show is unafraid of showing it. If Diane is awful, then basically everyone I know is awful, but at least Diane is trying, and not everyone I know is!
I think if you were talking about an earlier Season Diane I could agree with you, but I think her marriage with Mr. Peanutbutter and the resulting fallout did a pretty good job of teaching her what her own flaws are. The Diane of this episode/season definitely doesn’t seem as high-and-mighty as the Diane of Season 4.
I have yet to see evidence of copy editing at AV Club.
This wasn’t the best episode of the show, but you gotta note the great voice work by Lakeith Stanfield. To introduce a fully new character at a very late stage on a show like this and have them be a major love interest for one of the main characters is quite a feat and could quite easily have gone very poorly. But he made Guy understandable and likeable in just a few minutes of dialogue.
Look, Diane’s path always was going to lead to getting a job at WBEZ Chicago and becoming an NPR lady.
Post-Deadspin this is just the darkest episode I’ve ever seen
They really nailed Chicago, honestly. Between the weather, the accents, the Portillo’s pastiche and even the El station. I was wondering out loud why Diane would be going south on the green line when Guy told her she was on the wrong train (orange line goes to Midway).
I didn’t think the White Whale stuff was meant to be satire. I think it was more, “how do you even do satire under late stage capitalism.” The point of satire is to expose wrongdoing and to sting people into changing their bad behavior through public ridicule. But the hell of our current political system is that everyone knows about the wrongdoing, and rich people/politicians are so insulated from consequences that they don’t have to care about shame anymore. Diane’s job being bought out and her work becoming meaningless is an echo of that broader problem the show’s creators are facing – it felt like meta-commentary to me, and I thought it was great.
(Also great meta-commentary – Stephen Root doing a riff on Jimmy James, except he’s as evil as a “rich person who owns a media company” would be in real life.)
As someone who was sat working on final touches to an anthology of anti-capitalist TTRPG adventures while I watched this episode, I 100% agree. It wasn’t satire, because anything with a lighter hand than “rich people are legally allowed to commit murder” would be too close to reality. Disney is buying up every media company, there are basically only 10 food companies that own thousands of brands between them, Amazon had someone dead on a warehouse floor for half an hour before anyone found him, and we have a president who has literally joked about being able to shoot someone in broad daylight and still be loved.
Well what are those people going to do? Vote Democrat?
Before you sneer, ask yourself, can you imagine ANY scenario where you would vote Republican? I mean, Obama had a fleet of murder bots flying around the Middle East and sought to smooth over any legal consequences by classifying any fighting-age male caught in the explosion as a “combatant.” Most on the left brush that aside because they think acknowledging it would just give “the other side” an opening.
“Spread thinner than a shitty New York Pizza and workin’ harder than the ‘96 bulls”.
I hope this doesn’t count as spoilers, but Guy’s son’s name is Sonny and Sony’s mother’s name is Lady. How did they ever split up?