phucko

Bojack Horseman is perhaps the most overrated animated show of all time. To bite a keen line: This is a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent show looks like. Despite the praise that Bojack recieves for its approach of human issues, its clever humour, and its heartfelt writing, it handles each of these with a persistent inelegance, and lack of genuine daring. In reality, the emotional approach is caught somewhere between carelessly hipfire and outright jarring; the toneless humour is borrowed straight from Hollywood's creative landfil; and the clever writing is... I mean, it's simply completent writing, and not much more. Many people exclaimed that the series became better after the first half of the first season. In reality, it just became more generic - dropping the funny-animal humour that clearly failed to gain traction - settling into life as yet another show that bites the majority of its humour and style from the most marketable and easily adaptable adult cartoons of the past decade; and flexes emotional depth by shoehorning in the most approachable human issues it can find (while blatantly skirting any of the more risky or difficult ones). Sure, it does make more of an effor to delve into the human condition; but it does so with praise-driven desperation, and with no more skill than is needed to trick the inexperienced. This lack of originality is (clearly) easy to miss, if you've got a small pool from which to draw your comparisons. In short, Bojack Horseman is about as smart as a wet fart, and as tactful as a slap on the nose (Perhaps with an rolled newspaper). It's furbait, it's Oscarbait, and ultimately, it's a minor peak in the greater landscape of adult animation; elevated by a cultism that stems more from a need for thoughtful entertainment, than from the successful execution of such. Is it outright bad? No, it's not; it's simply alright, though far too caught up in its own aspirations - and, quite frankly, so are many of its fans.

Final Space is a heavily-marketed, finely tuned, ready-made franchise; unashamedly pointed at the modern male nerd with an under-developed sense of wit, and a disposable income to spend on Funko figurines. Some argument could be made about the visual quality of the show - and, like all shows that spend the entirety of their budget on visual effects, Final Space can be graphically spectacularly with a great fluidity of animation. Props to the suffering animators, as always. However, the praise stops there. This show is less courageous than Rick & Morty. It's less heartfelt than Futurama. It's less salient than the Venture Brothers, and less sly than any of the classics of Adult Swim. And, it's less intelligent and less humourous than all of these, and most other significant animated series in its category; making no honest effort to leave its comfortable place among the swathes of new-style adult cartoon that have been vomited forth from media machines to shamelessly capitalize on the success of Rick & Morty. What it IS, however, is yet another poorly-written, needlessly energetic, overly-assured adult series that has stumbled through the literary process to end up with just enough base appeal to linger on for two tedious, aimless, over-promoted seasons. It fumbles every joke and sequence with a childish naivety. You can almost hear the chittering of the marketing executives behind the scene, trying to engineer a show to be as mild and paletable to the modern mainstream audience as possible. And that’s another thing; there isn’t a single original thought wasted on this series. It is truly stale to the core, and everything about it screams out “Worn-out trope” or “Heavily-abused Hollywood standard”, or “Plea for the lingering appeal of the adorkable.”. It is the living definition of derivative. This is true for the characters: From the innocuous doofus of a white male protagonist; to his obligatory love interest, the dark-skinned, no-nonsense, affirmative-action-woman; the shippable anthropomorphs to capture the lucrative furry market; the needless, globular mascot; and the rest of them, I’ve already forgotten. The characters seem like they're designed purely for their market appeal; which is a slimy practice to any serious writer. It’s also true for the stories: the senseless procession of scenes to fulfil some flighty, hole-shot plotline, in order to simulate the sensation of narrative motion; as if the show had any reason for going wherever it purports to be going. It reaches gracelessly and cluelessly toward emotional appeal, and only barely falls short of outright begging the audience for emotional attachment. In fact, let me push it a step further: Final Space is the perfect example for why you, as a writer, shouldn’t endlessly regurgitate the things you see in other TV shows and movies. It clearly underlines the cancer of self-referential humour, low-effort parody, and inexperienced, echo-chamber scriptwriting that is killing modern entertainment, and has whittled the nuance of language and meaning down to a series of meaningless idioms and ingrained quips. This cheap, lazy mindset is the direct enemy of the fresh and original; and in Final Space, it’s as visible as a large, squealing media beast falling backwards off a ricketty bandwagon. Maybe I'm being a little cruel, or exaggerating the flaws of Final Space. There are certainly worse series by far; but few of them are so heavily promoted or baselessly praised (Apart from maybe Bojack Horseman - a more aware but equally rehashed shriek of attention from SoCal's insular creative circlejerk). There is a certain earnesty to the people that fall in love with bad shows like this - a starry-eyed gushing of praise and assurances of perfection, and a stunning blindness to any shortcomings. If you're even fainly familiar with this kind of emotional commitment, you'll see it generously lathered throughout the other public reviews - and any assumptions you might make about the desperate, over-exertive nerdcore humour, and generic, uninspired plotlines of Final Space will probably be correct. This show definitely appeals to the culturally devoid and artistically blind. To these people, I suggest you take a deeper dive into adult animation than what you'll find on the splash screen of Netflix. You may think that Final Space is a champion of ireverent adult animation - but in reality, it's a well-funded but exceedingly mediocre scrapbook of its contemporaries. It sits as a sieve on the surface of adult animation; catching anybody that scorns the effort needed to find the true gems. And to the people that wrote this show: Go read a **** book sometime.