Seinfeld is renowned for the acerbic behind-the-scenes mantra that dictated its tone - "No hugging; no learning". The acclaimed animated series BoJack Horseman, the fourth season of which premieres 8 September on Netflix, doesn't have a similarly guiding principle, although series creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg admits with a smile (and a warning that he was about to "go a bit blue") that when BoJack's writers were developing the show's third season, a phrase started to circulate around the writers' room.
"BoJack Horseman: If you don't get it by now, go fuck yourself."
It's important to clarify that neither Bob-Waksberg nor his colleagues are taking a swipe at BoJack's audience here. Instead, he's pointing out that the show has long been frank about what it is, which in his words kicked off as "a typical cartoon show that, as you watched it, gradually got darker and deeper and more introspective and more melancholy, and by the end of the first season you were surprised by the feelings you were feeling. 'I really care about these characters - what happened?'"
Of course, when you're trying to convince networks and producers to back such a project, that's maybe not what you lead with. "The pitch of the show itself, though?" says Bob-Waksberg. "Well, it's about a talking horse who was on a sitcom called Horsin' Around in the Nineties and is now a washed-up actor living in the Hollywood Hills, and he's this total misanthrope who complains about everything. Gradually, you learn to love him. Hate him. Both. That's not how we sold it to viewers - it was smuggled in for the audience. But when it pitched it to people who could actually make it, I was very upfront about that. And very excited about it."
And while BoJack Horseman has won over fans with its often-surreal skewering of the showbiz scene, it's actually the show's thoughtful and unflinching exploration of the scene's adjacent egomania, desperation and sadness that has regularly struck a chord with its fans. "In an interview about the first season, [series co-star] Paul F. Tompkins said - ah, I'm gonna mess this up! - that it's not a show for grown-ups, it's a show for adults," says Bob-Waksberg. "Or maybe it was the other way around. But the implication was clear - this wasn't a show with 'mature language' and 'mature themes', it was actually sophisticated in the way it talked about adult issues. It didn't use the adult animation label to be crude and crass and 'edgy'.
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"That's how I described it when I was trying to sell it - I wanted to play with the format and come up with the kind of show that isn't typically what you think of when you think of animation. What's interesting, though, is that I didn't tell that to all the actors, so they didn't know what they were signing up for.
"And one of the fun things about the first season was having table-reads of scripts and after each episode the actors were realising more and more the kind of show they were making. They had these really downer endings, and Will Arnett [who provides the voice of the title character] would just go 'Whooooa'. But that was cool because this was our first audience, so we kind of saw that if they were reacting in this way, it was good - that was the kind of reaction we were hoping for."
Over the course of its run so far, BoJack Horseman has been lauded and embraced not only for its smart-yet-goofy sense of humour and sensitive insight but also its imaginative approach to storytelling. Bob-Waksberg recognises that if he's going to engage viewers, he must first ensure he himself is all-in. "I think the thing we're constantly pushing is that I personally don't want to get bored with the show and I don't want the audience to get bored with the show," he says.
"If I start to get comfortable, we're letting ourselves off too easily. In Season Four we've tried to push ourselves when it comes to stories we haven't told yet, relationships we haven't explored yet, ways of telling stories. We're not quite as hung-up on concept. We do have a few episodes that are big swings, and I'm looking forward to seeing how people react to them. But we want to give you just enough of what you're expecting so you keep coming back but also keep you surprised. We want to zag when you think we're going to zig."
The new season of Bojack Horseman premieres 8 Sep on Netflix
