‘BoJack Horseman’ Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg Breaks Down His Favorite Unused Sequences

For five years now BoJack Horseman has reigned as the king of shows that make us say “What did I just watch?” From compelling depictions of mental illness to silly sight gags about chameleon women avoiding dates, Netflix’s sweetly somber show has given audiences some of the most introspective and funny moments of modern television. But according to show creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, there are countless silly jokes and soulful stories that get cut from season to season.

Unlike many other shows, BoJack doesn’t rely on a bank of unused jokes and plot points. “We break every season and every story individually, and we write jokes for that story and those characters and the relationships that we’re exploring,” Bob-Waksberg said. “Then as scenes get cut, they’re kinda gone. You can’t really repurpose them, with a few exceptions.” Here, Bob-Waksberg tells Decider about some of his favorite cut scenes from BoJack‘s ambitious and ever-depressing five-year history. (And of note, there are spoilers for the recently released Season 5 past this point.)

Stewart is the BoJack team’s favorite constantly cut side character.

There are a lot of excellent secondary characters in BoJack from Vincent Adultman to Sextina Aquafina. But according to the critically-acclaimed comedy’s creator, the team’s favorite character to write is Stuart, Princess Carolyn’s (Amy Sedaris) perpetually useless and lazy assistant.

“It’s a long running theme of the show which is that we’re constantly writing and throwing away bits for Stuart,” Bob-Waksberg says. “Poor James Adomian, who we love to write for, who’s so funny in the role, he doesn’t even know how many scenes he almost did that ended up not happening just because we had to make room for other stuff.”

Stewart has been cut from all sorts of crucial scenes, including telling Princess Carolyn that her love interest, Rutabaga Rabitowitz, wasn’t going to divorce his wife for her. “It was gonna be this big moment for Stuart that all this season you thought was this dumb idiot, but no actually he’s very observant,” he said. The revelation was eventually given to Rutabaga himself for timing reasons.

But at the end of Season 5 Stuart finally gets his moment in the sun. At the end of “The Stopped Show,” he finds his long-lost twin sister in a scene that makes you want to punch them both. That cringe-worthy moment was intentional. “We really felt like we owed it to this character,” Bob-Waksberg added.

Mr. Peanutbutter was supposed to train his political opponent Woodchuck Coodchuck-Berkowitz.

Thanks to a series of zany mishaps, Season 4 saw Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins) facing off against the incredibly capable Woodchuck Coodchuck-Berkowitz (Andre Braugher) for governor of California. It’s a very silly B-plot, but once Mr. Peanutbutter’s two ex-wives get involved in the mix, it becomes even sillier. According to Bob-Waksberg, the original draft of this plot wasn’t nearly as neat as it appeared in the finished cut. For a period of time Mr. Peanutbutter actually pretended to be Katrina and Jessica Biel in an attempt to train Woodchuck Coodchuck-Berkowitz.

Bob-Waksberg said that while Mr. Peanutbutter pretends to be his ex-wives and starts to complain about him, “he realizes what a bad husband he was to both these women, and it renews his dedication to Diane.”

However, this plot was cut for two reasons. There were too many attempts at saving Diane (Alison Brie) and Mr. Peanutbutter’s marriage throughout Season 4. Also, the only episode that had space for this subplot was “Ruthie,” a surprisingly sad episode that focuses on Princess Carolyn’s history of miscarriages. The writers decided this subplot was far too tonally jarring to be paired with “Ruthie.”

“We also made it up using some of the ideas from that episode this season in the Mr. Peanutbutter Halloween episode,” he said about the Season 5 episode “Mr. Peanutbutter’s Boos.” “I think it did actually work out for the best.”

Mr. Peanutbutter’s and Diane’s wedding was supposed to look very different.

Almost every season of BoJack features one high-concept episode — an episode that completely breaks from the show’s mold like Season 3’s “Fish Out of Water” or Season 5’s “Free Churro.” That deviation is noticeably absent from Season 1, but that wasn’t always the case. The episode about Mr. Peanutbutter and Diane’s wedding, which went on to become “Horse Majeure,” was originally supposed to be told in a series of 30-second vignettes that spanned roughly 40 days.

“We were just gonna blow through over a month in one episode but giving time to every single day,” Bob-Waksberg explained. There were long-running gags planned throughout this episode too. For example BoJack was supposed to buy a plant that could be seen in the background and there were going to be references to a billboard that said “The End Is Coming.” By the episode’s end, audiences would have watched BoJack’s plant slowly die and learned that the ominous warnings about the end of the world were really just advertising for a movie.

The episode format was ultimately cut because it didn’t make sense. Bob-Waksberg praised Master of None‘s “Mornings” for accomplishing the narrative arc his team couldn’t. “[There were] all these long running gags but then there was no place for any story anymore. How do you tell a story with just like 30-second scenes?”

BoJack was supposed to be the face of a “Hugs not drugs” campaign.

Considering that Season 5 primarily focuses on BoJack’s intense substance abuse problems, this is an especially haunting dropped idea. In Season 1 there was supposed to be an issues-based episode centered around the idea of telling kids that all drugs are bad. The episode played into the idea that labelling all drugs as bad without distinguishing between the effects of substances like marijuana and heroin can lead some people down a slippery slope.

“We had an episode all about that where BoJack unwittingly becomes the face of the ‘Hugs not Drugs’ campaign and kinda rebels against it,” the show creator said.

But because the team was already planning on doing the “BoJack Hates the Troops” episode, the drugs campaign was cut. “We ended up doing BoJack steals the D from the Hollywood sign, which ended up becoming a much bigger part of our show’s mythology.”

One of Princess Carolyn’s miscarriages happened with BoJack.

Season 4 was an especially difficult one for Princess Carolyn. After finally finding a good partner in Ralph Stilton (Raúl Esparza), Princess Carolyn suffers through two more miscarriages, deciding to destroy her own life. Over the course of the show’s history it’s been revealed that Princess Carolyn has had a total of five miscarriages — two with Ralph and one with her neighbor when she was a teenager. But at least in one draft of the show, one of the two unaccounted for miscarriages happened with BoJack.

“There was one scene that I loved from the end of Season 4,” Bob-Waksberg said about a vulnerable conversation that happens between between Princess Carolyn and BoJack in “What Time Is It Right Now.” “In that scene with BoJack, we actually originally had a talk about one of those miscarriages with BoJack. And they discuss it for a little bit.”

“I think it was a very lovely scene and conversation, but it wasn’t really necessary for what we needed in that episode,” he said.

However, this doesn’t mean that scene is canon. “It still might be a conversation we revisit at some point if [Princess Carolyn’s] narrative doesn’t change. Like I said, the only canon that exists is the canon that has been established on the show,” Bob-Waksberg said. “Now there’s no guarantee that those miscarriages will include BoJack unless we establish it later, but at the time it felt like a nice little moment.”

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