TV Recap: BoJack Horseman - "Chickens"

Hello and welcome to a TV Recap series about our favorite half man/half horse 90's celebrity BoJack Horseman. Please join as I delve into the second season of the Netflix cartoon that takes on Hollywoo and discover what it takes to be famous while dealing with your deadbeat friends and traumatic past. While there's guaranteed to be hilarity, will there be as much brilliance as the first season? Let's quit Horsin' Around and just get on with it. Come for the recaps, stay for the jokes and dissections of each episode's best moments. It's the right thing to do. So join me every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for the latest and greatest.

"Nobody knows chickens like chickens."

- Gentle Farms

Plot:

When a truck from chicken company Chicken 4 Dayz gets into a collision, a renegade chicken goes loose. With Todd (Aaron Paul) unsure what to do with his days, he decides to help a chicken that he has seen wandering around. Meanwhile, Officer Meow-Meow Fuzzyface (Cedric Yarbrough) decides to go looking for him. BoJack Horseman (Will Arnett) works on the movie with Kelsey Jannings (Maria Bamford) as Diane Nguyen (Allison Brie) watches her daughter Irving (Amy Schumer). When Todd decides that a farm will be the safest place for a chicken, he sends his renegade chicken there only to find that they're murderous. Kelsey is concerned that BoJack only cares about himself. When Fuzzyface arrests everyone, BoJack helps them out, thus realizing that it is in fact, all about BoJack Horseman.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Secondary Character MVP:

Chicken

I think that this issue with this particular story is that I don't care for how ridiculous things gets. The chicken story has some clever moments, but it feels like too much of a lowbrow story to ever get the insight and humor that makes BoJack Horseman so compelling. However, Chicken is the driving force of the episode and its nonsensical cries are the reason that we're all here. Yes, I may think that Officer Meow-Meow Fuzzyface is more of an inspired introduction, but Chicken goes through the rounds of being more integral to the plot.

Best Joke

BoJack Horseman reaches its most meta Simpsons moment by commenting on the episode behind them. With all of the crazy events that happened, it would be interesting to reflect on how helping a chicken and getting bailed out of jail is helpful. While it helps continuity for future episodes, it still seems random and out of place here. Which is why the joke that nothing important really happened is both a great gag and a reflection on why this may be my least favorite episode of the series so far. Even with great jokes, it feels more like filler than anything great.

Overall Thoughts

As one can likely guess based on this piece so far, this is my least favorite episode of BoJack Horseman so far. It isn't that it isn't funny. I simply find the premise to be a little hacky and the show doesn't do much that is new with it. I don't find much weight in having a nonsensical chicken as a supporting character. I think that Irving and Officer Meow-Meow Fuzzyface may be interesting characters in the future, but they have nothing really to do here. I think that it feels heavily like the show needed filler and decided to dedicate it to a derange tale of violence and procedural humor that works part of the time, but not enough to make it all that impressive.