I Just Finished Tuca and Bertie on Netflix. I Hate it. Here's Why... (Show Spoilers)

[GFNimbuscloud]

If you're a fan of Netflix's Bojack Horseman, and regularly surf around the streaming service, you've probably at least seen a newer series, Tuca and Bertie. At a glance, you'll notice that the art style is practically the same, and this might lead you to conclude the shows cover similar themes and topics.

I love Bojack. I hated the first episode, I showed it to a friend to harp on how much I hated it. We kept talking through the credits, and the second episode started... and then, I blinked, and the seasons was over, leaving us craving more. I'm not as happy as I could be with the later seasons, but it's still one of, if not the best adult animated shows I've seen.

Back in the 90's I was in a. . . .

I did not finish Tuca and Bertie in one sitting. It took me four or five, and toward the end, the only thing that really kept me going was relishing the thought that it was almost over. I took to the online forums, because I wanted to hear the chatter, and I was actually pretty surprised to see how well received it seemed.

Intermingled with the praise of the show, fans seemed to get a bit defensive around 2 main points. The first was that they thought people would pour undue hate on it because it stars female leads. The second is that they thought people would go into it thinking it was meant to be a "Bojack 2.0" and feel disappointed.

I find the latter absolutely detestable; fuck you guys. I am so tired of this bullshit, of women being (or claiming to be) untouchable by the virtue of their sex organs. I swear this shit has been going on for as long as I've been alive. I'm not going to preface this by saying I like plenty of shows that feature and focus on women and list a bunch, just like I wouldn't say I have black friends, so I'm allowed to criticize shows with black people. I don't need that crutch, sex and race should be irrelevant, I'm going to criticize this pile of hot trash based on its merit, and if you don't like it you're free to spin it that I'm a racist, sexist, piece of shit. I hope you realize your best defenses aren't from saying anything smart or making any actual points, but from poisoning the well. You're intellectual charlatans, and I hope you wake the fuck up someday.

To the latter... It quickly became apparent that it wasn't meant to be in the same universe. T&B is much more wacky and surreal, it's got a totally different tone, and the universe is quick to show off it's got more cartoonish laws and physics governing it. It's still hard not to judge it against Bojack. For one thing, the art style invites that comparison. For another, Bojack is the best adult cartoon I've seen in a long, long while, it's incredibly difficult to not want to use it as a sort of base-line. Nevertheless, I didn't need it to be Bojack in order for it to be good. I just needed for it to be good.

Can you really blame anyone for wanting to compare them?

I posted a similar article with a lot of the same points on the Tuca and Bertie Subreddit. Discussion there has been mostly civil, and the majority of comments seem to think I make at least some good points, though I'm still getting downvoted into oblivion by the silent readers. I kind of expected that, to be honest, since one would assume the majority of people on the sub would be fans, though I was pleasantly surprised how much actually discussion there was. I thought I'd clean the post up a bit, and repost it here, to get a more neutral take.

As a quick disclaimer, I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't enjoy the show, just that I didn't, I thought it had a lot of problems, and I wanted to talk about them. I wholeheartedly encourage you to give it a shot and judge for myself, but this is a MYtake, so listen to me rant:

So... Where to start..? Everything?

I hate the characters. I don't think there was a single character I liked that wasn't a background character.

I really hated Tuca. I have a feeling she was meant to be so whimsical and obnoxious she's charming. They certainly got the first two down. I found her absolutely impossible to like, in large part because she's constantly hurting people; sometimes she's indirectly or even directly causing people physical harm, other times she's ruining their days with no sympathy, remorse or regret. She comes off as a total psychopath, and, ironically I guess, that makes it hard to empathize with her.

I hate Bertie. I actually liked her at first, her neuroticism is something I can sympathize with and relate to, but I feel like they use it way, way too much, and it became annoying. It also seemed to turn on and off randomly and... I dunno, she seems to have a remarkable lack of self-awareness. I couldn't get over how (literally) insane it was for her to chase down the motorcycle for cutting her off, with the intent to kick a random motorist's (who turned out to be her coach) ass. She did a lot of things over the course of the show that I saw no clear motivation for, or that seemed either needlessly vindictive or hypocritical. Like Tuca, there are some times where it seems like it's okay for her to hurt other people, but it's not okay for anyone to hurt her.

I hated Speckle from the moment I saw his stupid fucking face. He's very sweet. He's unrealistically sweet and understanding at times, but he's just too... quirky? I dunno, maybe it's just a personal thing. I think he can be really manipulative at times too, and I don't like that. Other times, he's a total doormat, and I don't like that either. He and Bertie have no chemistry in my opinion. Basically the entire show, I was rooting for them to break up, and disappointed with them still together by the end. First I wanted her to cheat on him with Pastry Pete, and for them to become a thing, which I think would've made a really compelling story. Then, Pete became evil apparently, so I just wanted her to leave him on her own, for her own sake.

And then there's Pastry Pete. If I had to pick a fourth main character and a primary antagonist, it'd be him, I don't know for sure, but I'd wager he gets the fourth most amount of screentime.

Pastry Pete confused the hell out of me. At first he seemed really charming and helpful. He was strict and formal in the kitchen, but that just made it seem like that was his teaching style, and that he was actually a good teacher. He and Bertie seemed to get along really well, and she was even crushing on him. Then there's that weird banana roux (I want to say that was wordplay on roue, but I know this show isn't that clever.) scene. He was being weirdly aggressive out of the blue, but I still didn't really identify him doing anything wrong. To my perception he was just really into his baking, and excited to show her something. I REALLY didn't see anything wrong with it when she ran off to the bathroom to rub one out, I thought it was totally in her head, that she was just feeling guilty about her attraction, and that they actually had chemistry.

Part of me thinks that's the intended result. Not for the the super clever reason I'm sure an apologist would give, that Bertie let herself believe there wasn't anything wrong, and the show tricks you into thinking that too, until revealing him as an evil harasser. No, again, I don't think this show is that clever, it feels like they had a plotline in mind for him, and changed their minds halfway through production, turning him into an entirely different character. He seems like a genuinely good mentor for the first half of the show, and then out of nowhere, she doesn't go to dinner with him, and he turns into an evil molester asshole.

And what the fuck is up with the canary blaming Bertie for that roux shit when he tries it on her? They bonded for like a week or two, and then she just walks out of the show, never to be heard from again, because she blames Bertie for Pete making her uncomfortable... WTF.

Enough about the characters.

I hate it because it's tone-deaf. In ten episodes, there were maybe 4 jokes that landed for me. Here come the inevitable, perhaps unfair comparisons; but in Bojack they have this mastery over the tone of the show. Bojack can be funny, and it can be heart-warming, and it can be tear-jerking, and it can flow between these various emotions seamlessly, the transitions always felt appropriate. Here, it just seems like pure wackiness until a handful of episodes in, when we meet Tuca's aunt, and it flirts with getting a little more serious and gritty, but it never pulls it off in my eyes. Not in a satisfactory way at least. Their confrontation just feels awkward and tacked on to me, and they don't ever really address it again. I feel similar about the big reveal that Bertie got molested. It's not that I have no sympathy; fuck I've been molested; it just didn't come across as natural or well delivered to me, the resolution felt cheap and tacked on, and... I dunno, it felt like a bad filler arc.

It's also an 'adult' show in the most obnoxious way, where they just throw in gratuitous swearing and nudity to come off as edgy (there's a fucking pastry with a boob.) It tried to throw fighting into the mix too, there are a few scenes where I feel like it wants to be something like Superjail was (the giant crab, Tuca fighting the cult), but they all fall flat on their asses to me. All of this just comes off as juvenile, it might've been titillating when I was a teenager, but I'm not into shock value for the sake of it anymore, and none of it is really even that shocking.

I hate the music. This might just be another unreasonable personal preference of mine, but I've never liked 'music' where they just take a sample of someone talking, and then play with the tone, and that's plastered everywhere here.

I hate the plant-people. They just make no sense to me, and they look shitty. The neighbor plant lady is also a mcguffin for lazy writing. She just resolves the jaguar plot, and Tuca's angst a bit later on. Also... she sends Tuca to a cult. The cult-members say she sends people to them all the time. Tuca disrupts the entire group, and burns the commune down... and she doesn't give one shit, helps her out with that angst, and sends her on her way. Yeah, she's literally just a plot device.

I hate the wordplay. Another perhaps unfair comparison to Bojack. At best the wordplay went on for two measly lines. Whenever I saw them attempt it, I just thought of Princess Carolyn's wonderful speeches. They'd make Princess Carolyn make the grumpy cat face. (RIP grumpy cat.)

I hate the weird feminist messages. Okay, sexual harassment in the workplace isn't cool. I dig that. Tuca obnoxiously chiming in with an alarm for when a woman hasn't spoken out lout for three minutes during a meeting? Fucking speak out loud then! That's what meetings are for! Bertie saying she wants to protect the teen girls from 'Men?' Okay... I'll chalk that up to her thinking about her abuse. Not gonna lie, I've got all kinds of knee-jerk reactions there, about how men get harassed and abused too, but maybe I'm being a little too sensitive. Every dude in the show being either a doormat, a scum-fuck, and/or a total moron? Actually, that's not fair, the monkey-dude was pretty cool, but I think every other guy is pretty pathetic. Like Bojack, I think they did have the self-awareness to make fun of the more radical feminism a bit, with some of the WTUS scenes, but I still find some of the 'messages' they push a little cringy.

There's probably more... I'm sure there's a lot more I could find to complain about, if I really combed through it. I won't though, I have my catharsis, and I'm ready to put this piece of trash out of my mind. Am I really the only one who didn't like it though?

Eh, whatever. Thanks for listening.

[TheBlackBankai]

I was only introduced to this God awful show because adult swim decided to pick it up for its 2nd season after its cancellation on Netflix and right off the bat I found it simply repulsive, irritating, incredibly unfunny, and just plain downright stupid in my opinion!

The animation style looks like lazy ass tumbler art, the humor (if it could even be considered as much) falls flat and is more irritating than entertaining, and it just comes across like some uberfeminist & angry lesbian nightmare on steroids that goes out of its way to insult or denigrate men or at the very least, make them out to constantly be the butt of the humorless, unimaginative, unoriginal, & lazy jokes, bumbling fools, evil misogynists, and/or sexual predators and serial abusers!!

Personally, it comes across as a mediocre and lazily written show that panders to the angry, man-hating feminists, LGBT crowd, and the sad and unfortunately & incredibly easily amused & entertained and some of the lowest common denominator.
Now, that's not to say that it's totally devoid of some redeeming qualities.

There are some certain situations which are relatable and somewhat believable sometimes but, just not enough to honestly justify its ability to earn a time slot on cable TV that could've possibly been occupied by a much better written, better drawn, more entertaining, and had a far broader appeal that caters to a larger and more diverse audience of people of all ages, instead of catering to a much smaller minority (ideologically, gender, sexual orientation, race, & nationalities) group of people, and one that offers a more immersive, relatable, and escapist type of entertainment that so much of our modern TV programming lacks these days, mainly thanks to political correctness, SJW ideology consumed, cancel culture, and where creators are restrained, unwilling to take risks, be truly original, possibly come across as controversial or even slightly offensive, and most likely ending up with a great and far more enjoyable and entertaining viewing experience that so many, like myself, are desperate for and can only find anymore by going back a decade or so to watch reruns of older shows! In short, I utterly hate, detest, or just plain despise this show!!

And maybe it's possibly because I'm getting older and I've become jaded, pessimistic, more picky & discriminating, and more closed minded along with that age, or maybe it's just like all of the angry feminists, SJWs, & other types of man haters say when any confident, privileged, straight, white, man voices his opinion on shows like this, "well, it's not meant for you and if you don't like it, don't watch it!"😝, which I don't & I gladly and abruptly stopped watching after 2 or 3 episodes, and maybe they're right but, that doesn't change the fact or delegitimize my genuine opinion that this show undeniably just sucks ass!!

Sorry, not sorry!!

That's just how I see it and I still long for the great TV shows I remember enjoying as a teen all the way up through my 20s & 30s and that I'm desperately holding out hope that one day this toxic environment and the super fragile, hyper thin skinned & both easily and perpetually offended mentality, and of course, all this cancel culture nonsense gets old, wears out its welcome, people finally get their fill of it and open their minds again so that the kind of truly entertaining, creative, original, relatable, and immersive TV makes its triumphant return and the whole world can once again rejoice!!!

Until then, I'll continue with my useless bitching, complaining, and wishfully thinking & dreaming of that day!!!😅

So, here's to wishing for dreams to come true!!!🙏🙏🙏

[Pink2000]

I just finished it too. I like Bojack wayyy more. Maybe it’ll get better the next season cause I didn’t like Bojack at first.

[GFNimbuscloud]

I believe the second episode of Bojack is the ordeal where Boj steals a meal from Neal McBeal the Navy Seal. I was hooked after that. Lots of people say it took Bojack the first season to get good, but I think you just have to get past the first episode, so I'll never be convinced there.

That said, I''m not sure you actually should compare the shows if you want to give it a fair shake, even though it's kinda hard not to. I am kind of hoping T&B gets better in the second season. I've got a few ideas for what I'd like to see, but I doubt any of them will play out.