One of the best things to come out of the success of BoJack Horseman was Tuca & Bertie.
The show from BoJack production designer Lisa Hanawalt followed two birds, voiced by Ali Wong and Tiffany Haddish, attempting to navigate problems in their relationships and workplaces. It was unceremoniously dumped by Netflix after a single season, something BoJack creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg thinks is wrong.
The showrunner of the long-running Netflix series, which is coming to a close with a two-part final season that picks back up in January, said Tuca wasn't given time to find an audience like his creation was.
"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,'" he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. "We didn’t get a full two-season pickup, but that was the understanding, that these things take time to build."
Bob-Waksberg thinks the streaming service has moved away from nurturing shows as the amount of content they release has grown exponentially.
"It was my understanding that that was, at the time, the Netflix model: to give shows time to build," he said. "I think it’s a shame that they seem to have moved away from that model."
Bob-Waksberg is by no means an impartial observer of the end of Tuca & Bertie. He served as an executive producer of the series and wrote the script for the first episode. Still, he's far from alone in thinking the show was booted from the nest prematurely. Critics and viewers alike attacked the streaming platform's decision to end the show after only one season.
