An appreciation of Hollyhock, BoJack Horseman's most valuable supporting player
Back in the 2010s, there was a very famous TV show, one that captured The A.V. Club's imagination for six seasons. As BoJack Horseman turns 10 this week, we’ll be looking back at the engrossing animated comedy with a series of essays and interviews. This is BoJack Horseman Week.
One of the greatest strengths of BoJack Horseman was the sheer depth of its supporting character bench. Few other shows could keep up with how fast it introduced new characters in the background and the foreground, how good the illustrators were at making every character recognizable, and how sharp the casting directors were when they paired actors to the ones who had lines. And when the series wrapped up, it paid tribute to that bench by featuring as many of them as they possibly could. The penultimate episode "The View From Halfway Down" resurrected the cast’s dearly departed and let their ghosts haunt BoJack All That Jazz-style. And the finale "Nice While It Lasted" featured a plethora of Hollywoo luminaries and bit players, from the jury who convicted BoJack to the guest list of Princess Carolyn’s wedding.
In this grand display of cameos and background gags, one face was noticeably absent: BoJack's supposed daughter turned half-sister Hollyhock Manheim-Mannheim-Guerrero-Robinson-Zilberschlag-Hsung-Fonzerelli-McQuack. It was a heartbreaking omission, but one that was true to the bittersweet end BoJack Horseman had written for itself, and one that emphasized how important Hollyhock had become to the emotional narrative of the series. Despite coming in midway through the show’s run and featuring in far fewer episodes than any of the main cast, Hollyhock kept the pace to earn the title of MVP amongst the series' supporting cast, responsible for the show's highest and lowest emotional beats. She became the linchpin of the hope that everything was going to be okay, and the deciding factor that things would be farthest from that point.
Teased in the closing moments of season-three finale "That Went Well," Hollyhock was fully introduced in season four's "Hooray! Todd Episode!" as a teenage newcomer to Hollywoo following up on the hunch that BoJack could be her biological father. It was an opportune introduction, both to emphasize BoJack's shady past catching up to him, and that he was badly in need of someone new to talk to. After three seasons BoJack had burned so many bridges that none of the main characters had a reason to be around him, and to pick those relationships back up like nothing happened would be following the sitcom logic that BoJack Horseman thrived on subverting. Having this unexpected connection forced him out of his head and back into the world, first being pulled into the search for her mother, and subsequently guilt-tripped into providing care for his own mother. Hollyhock was willing to play his games, willing to look him in the eye when he messed up, and willing to call him out on his bullshit in a way that he'd listen to.
More importantly, Hollyhock was also fun. As voiced by comedian Aparna Nancherla, she came across as earnest and good-natured, feeling like a real person/horseperson rather than a narrative contrivance. (Or as real as anyone can get in BoJack Horseman's sitcom-coded world: Her long name came from being adopted by eight men in a gay polyamorous relationship, all of whom had the vibe of wacky special guest star when eventually introduced.) Good-natured and a bit ditzy, with a penchant for snacking and laziness that betrayed her Horseman lineage, there was something refreshingly real about her in a world of characters drowned in Hollywoo double talk and emotional baggage. She could be startled by what was happening around her, but was also clear-eyed enough about what she's gotten into, avoiding the way other characters of this type would be treated as naive obstacles. Case in point, her first meeting with her father. BoJack: "Let me be the first to tell you: I'm bad news." Hollyhock: "You're actually not the first to tell me that." It’s a welcome energy Nancherla would hone over the the seasons, and would later carry over to roles on Bob’s Burgers and The Great North.
The fun and realism of Hollyhock only made it hit harder when BoJack Horseman did what it would naturally do to any innocent in its world, and pulled her into its tar pits of trauma. At the same time she was trying to connect with her newly-discovered grandmother Beatrice, said grandmother—addled by dementia and her own traumatic upbringing—started drugging Hollyhock's coffee with weight-loss amphetamines. (A detail playing out in slow-motion to anyone paying attention to changing character designs.) BoJack's reactions to her eventual hospitalization—broad panic that he could be responsible, genuinely terrifying rage at realizing who was—was the most alive audiences had seen him in a long time, lifted from his most positive tiers of lightly sardonic or glibly nihilistic. It was a flash of energy that Todd or Princess Carolyn or even Diane couldn't draw out of him, that he couldn’t save someone from the same black hole that made him who he was.
It also made the eventual reveal of who Hollyhock was all the more impactful. As creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg said in an interview after season four's release, Hollyhock was originally intended to be BoJack's daughter, only to pivot to sister based on a pitch from writer Kelly Galuska. It was a decision that was brilliant in hindsight, recalibrating her from another BoJack failure to a shared victim of the trauma that was the Horseman family. For once BoJack wouldn't be repeating the cycle, but could form a new connection, a peer rather than the potential for failure. The closing moment of "What Time Is It Right Now" as Hollyhock acknowledged what had happened and also acknowledged him as her brother is the purest moment of joy that BoJack Horseman ever allowed itself, the smile crossing BoJack's face teasing the possibility that he could be happy without qualifiers.
But a happy ending was never something BoJack Horseman would deliver without a mountain of qualifiers, and the writing staff were painfully aware of how to leverage audience affection for Hollyhock. Her first major appearance after season four was "Ancient History," returning to Hollywoo in the middle of BoJack's Philbert run and increasing addiction to painkillers. After she flushed his pills in a moment of PTSD panic, BoJack dragged her along on the hunt for more, a search that was made all the uglier by his passive-aggressive digs about how this was her fault. It made the entire affair feel as warped as BoJack's eulogy for the mother he hated, and Hollyhock's eventual pushback hit all the harder. Once again she stood out as the one person left that BoJack could still feel bad about disappointing, and the one who could say something to him that would get through. For him to promise her he wouldn't take painkillers unless he needed them—and then immediately drive himself into traffic to keep that promise in the most twisted way—only made it clear what a mess he'd become.
Yet that interaction was small change to how dark season five would get, and how things would get worse in future seasons, yanking away the idea of a happy ending with all the force of Lucy snatching Charlie Brown's football. After accepting her brother back in her life—a shared hug and grin in "The Face of Depression" one of the best moments of grace in an episode that specialized in providing them—a chance encounter at a New York City party led Hollyhock to discover just how deep his inner darkness ran. Nothing was ever the same after that. Her interactions with BoJack in "Intermediate Scene Study w/BoJack Horseman" had the awkwardness of someone being embarrassed by their older brother, but with an ugly undercurrent, as if she couldn't trust him to do something out of bounds at any given moment. Their last interaction saw Hollyhock throw in his face that they were essentially strangers to each other, and it deflated hours of emotional progress in the span of moments.
The sense of loss in that moment would reach its apex in "The Horny Unicorn," where all of BoJack's worst misdeeds were dragged into the spotlight—made all the worse by his addiction to being in that spotlight. None of the main cast had much sympathy to offer BoJack after that point, to the point where reaching out to Hollyhock for some kind of acknowledgment was all he had left, and every time she didn't pick up the phone it reemphasized how alone he truly was. Her only outreach to him in a time of crisis was receiving a letter, which he held off opening as long as possible. And once he did, he looked at the bottle in his other hand like he'd lost the last excuse not to return to its embrace, embarking back on the downward spiral that would take us to the eventual view from halfway down.
Exactly how Hollyhock left things between her and BoJack remains one of the unanswered questions of the BoJack Horseman. (Even to the people who created it: Bob-Waksberg said on his now defunct Twitter account that the contents of that letter were never even written by the creative team.) And it's also the most fitting way it could have left that relationship, encompassing fully the central dilemmas of the show: whether BoJack was capable of changing, and whether he deserved to be forgiven for what he'd done. To have Hollyhock enter his life as something new and good, and leave it as one more sign of his personal failings, proved how thorny both questions were. It was bittersweet, it rang true, and left you still holding onto some bit of hope—about as true of an encapsulation of the BoJack Horseman ethos as any character could deliver.