“BoJack” Creator Notes That Netflix’s Current Model Isn’t Working For New Content

Creator of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, is continuing to make the rounds about the show’s sixth and final season. The first half is streaming now and the second half is coming in January (which he says in this same interview was important to get both halves in within a couple of months ) and the most interesting part in the conversation from the LA Times was this one where Raph is asked about why Tuca & Bertie went down after only one season. While the show is still being shopped to other networks and as he’s waiting on whether or not Undone’s gonna get a second go, Raph comes clean as to what he thinks went wrong here:

In terms of the critical response and also, I think, in terms of the audience, it took a season or two for people to understand exactly what “BoJack” was up to. Because you’ve been such a supporter of hers, I’m wondering if you think Netflix gave Lisa Hanawalt’s “Tuca & Bertie” a fair shake by not giving it that time to have people figure out what it was up to.

When we started on “BoJack,” it was understood that the Netflix model was to give shows time to find an audience, and to build that audience, and I remember being told, “We expect the biggest day ‘BoJack’ Season 1 is going to have is when we launch ‘BoJack’ Season 2.” We didn’t get a full two-season pickup, but that was the understanding, that these things take time to build. It was my understanding that that was, at the time, the Netflix model: to give shows time to build. I think it’s a shame that they seem to have moved away from that model.

We actually wrote an entire article supporting Raphael’s comments where we mentioned that Netflix has a bloat problem which is probably what is leading to his point. All of this despite the fact that Tuca & Bertie was excellent, just buried in a heap of content geared towards the hardcore video gaming audience that probably wouldn’t care for that show as opposed to BoJack Horseman which was part of a young enough service where less is more and the long-running animated series was probably the best original series on there aside from House of Cards, both among a pool of originals. With the streaming wars incoming, Netflix will probably have a few regrets…losing Raphael will be one of them.