#KetchupCut: The tragic brilliance of writing Beatrice Horseman as a bad mother

This piece explores how the writers of BoJack Horseman wrote Beatrice Horseman as a mother who is both deeply damaged and damaging, revealing the horrifyingly human bitterness at the core of her nature.

The episode “Free Churro” opens with BoJack Horseman standing alone at a podium, seemingly addressing a full room. He starts speaking by recalling how, when someone asks how your day is going, most people just say, “It’s fine.” Even if it’s not. Because the moment you say it isn’t fine, people want to know why. And then you think, you even have a good reason to be sad. So, you say, everything is going so well. But on this day, BoJack had a reason. When an employee at a fast food restaurant asked how his day was, he didn’t say “fine.” He said, “I’m sad. My mom died.” And the woman at the counter started crying and gave him a free churro. And BoJack, in his classic, half-sincere, half-sarcastic tone, says: “Wow. Nobody ever tells you that when your mom dies, you get a free churro.”

That’s how BoJack opens the eulogy for his mother. It's not the kind of tribute you expect to hear at a funeral, but then again, Beatrice Horseman was never the kind of mother who earned a warm send-off. Throughout his monologue, BoJack doesn’t mourn her death as much as he excavates their broken relationship, layer by layer. He rants, mocks, and spirals, but even in between those biting sarcasms and unresolved resentments, we notice a flickering sense of understanding. You realise that Beatrice is one of television’s most well-written bad mothers. This is not because she’s secretly good or gets a redemptive arc, but because she is horrifyingly human.

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While we may recoil at how she treats her son, BoJack, the show’s nuanced writing ensures we don't fully hate her, but instead grapple with the pain that shaped her. Through her actions, the devastating impact on BoJack, and his raw reflections in his eulogy at her funeral, Beatrice emerges as a well-written character whose portrayal attempts to find answers to some of the show's central questions: Can we break the cycles that break us?

At her funeral, BoJack keeps circling back to the night his mother died when, despite the incoherent screams that filled the hospital room, he was taken aback by one quiet moment. He recalled feeling no words of judgment or disappointment when she looked at him and said, “I see you,” which was also the last thing she ever said to him. He was quick to admit to feeling strange to be fifty-four, and realising it was the first time his mother really saw him. Like most things in his life, he goes on to overthink that maybe it was her way of saying that no matter how he fools everyone else, she sees him for who he is, or that she understood him. And then he wonders if the meaning even matters now that she’s gone. Maybe it’s foolish, the way we pin significance to every little thing. Maybe “I see you” only felt significant because he needed it to be.  

In order to understand the character of Beatrice Horseman, one must know that she is not a mother who forgets birthdays or misses important occasions; her failures are portrayed in much deeper ways. She is emotionally abusive, wielding sharp words and cold indifference like weapons. In flashbacks, we see her berate young BoJack, blaming him for her unhappiness. One of her chilling lines, delivered in the episode “Brand New Couch,” “You’re broken, BoJack. And there is no cure for that," reflects this. She neglects his emotional needs, dismisses his vulnerabilities, and instills in him a belief that he’s inherently unlovable. Her alcoholism and resentment toward her husband, Butterscotch, amplify her detachment, leaving BoJack to go through a childhood full of loneliness and rejection. 

Yet, the genius of Beatrice’s writing lies in how the show peels back her layers to reveal the roots of her cruelty. In the episodes “The Old Sugarman Place” and “Time’s Arrow,” we see her as a young woman, bright and idealistic, crushed by a patriarchal society and a traumatic upbringing. Her mother, Honey, emotionally suffered after her son’s death and underwent a lobotomy at the behest of Beatrice’s domineering father, Joseph. This loss, coupled with Joseph’s misogynistic control, teaches Beatrice that love is a liability and vulnerability is weakness. Her dreams of intellectual freedom are further stifled when an unplanned pregnancy with BoJack traps her in a loveless marriage to Butterscotch, a failed writer whose infidelity and ego mirror her own bitterness. Beatrice’s cruelty to BoJack isn’t random; it’s the byproduct of a life where her agency was stripped away, leaving her to project her pain onto her son.

This context doesn’t absolve her but complicates her. We hate Beatrice for the damage she inflicts, but we understand her as a product of her circumstances. The show’s writers, led by Raphael Bob-Waksberg created her as a tragic figure, not a monster, ensuring her actions feel human rather than melodramatic. Her intelligence, seen in her biting wit and fleeting moments of clarity, hints at the woman she could have been, making her failures all the more poignant. Beatrice’s parenting is the crucible in which BoJack’s insecurities are forged. Her constant criticism and emotional neglect shape his core belief that he’s “poison,” or someone who “ruins everything he touches,” as he later describes himself.

Bojack Horseman is an actor and reminisces the first times he ever performed in front of an audience was with her mom. She used to arrange these fancy parties with her friends in the living room, and she made Bojack sing “The Lollipop Song”. These parties included skits, magic acts but the most special thing about these parties was the big finale with the dance that his mom used to do. She had this beautiful dress that she only brought out for these parties and she did amazing. His dad didn't like these parties but he always came out of his study room to see his mom dance. Bojacks says, “As a child who was equally scared of both my parents, I knew that this moment of grace, it actually meant something.” These moments reminded him that they understood each other. His mom knew what it was like to feel all your life as if you are drowning with the exception of these moments. In these brief, rare instances, in which you suddenly remember that you can swim. But not all the time, mostly you're drowning, she understood that too. The same goes for Bojack and his Dad, they knew, mostly they were drowning and didn't know what to do to save each other. But there was an understanding that we are all drowning together. Bojack says, maybe that's what she meant when she said “I see you” 

The show’s exploration of generational trauma is most vivid in how Beatrice’s pain becomes BoJack’s. Her belief that life is a series of disappointments, instilled by her own unfulfilled dreams, is passed down to him like a toxic heirloom. This writing makes her “bad mother” status narratively essential as she becomes a catalyst for the show’s themes of accountability and healing. We despise her for breaking BoJack, yet we see how she was broken first, creating a cycle that’s as heartbreaking as it is infuriating.

BoJack explains that his idea of what it means to be good was shaped largely by television, where parents might not always give you everything you want but every once in a while they do something grand or surprising that makes you forgive all the neglect, yet in real life, it does not work that way because you cannot simply get away with doing one big thing and erase all the rest, you have to be consistently good, dependably good, which is difficult for most people, and so we grow up believing that even if our parents are not exactly what we want them to be, they still love us. BoJack reflects on a friend whose father died recently and how, months after the loss, she still carries a sense of grief even though she hated him for most of her life, and he tries to understand and explain that feeling by comparing it to watching a television show in the hope that it will improve but it never does, and when the show finally ends, you feel anger not because you actually liked it but because you knew it could have been so much better, and losing a parent is like that because while they are alive, even if you do not admit it, you hold onto the hope that the relationship might get better but once they are gone, that hope is lost forever.

It doesn't take long for Bojack to realize that when his mother said “I see you” in the hospital, she was simply reading the sign for the ICU and she wasn't talking to him, and he says, “My mom died and all I got was a free churro,” before going on to emphasize that the simple kindness shown by the girl who gave him that free churro was more genuine than any kindness his mother ever showed him throughout his entire life.

Beatrice is a well-written bad mother precisely because she feels painfully real. Her character  portrays how, if we don’t confront and heal our own pain, we risk passing that bitterness on to others, often without meaning to. In this way, Beatrice’s character and her writing becomes a cautionary tale about the cycles of hurt we inherit and sometimes unknowingly perpetuate.

What are your thoughts on Beatrice Horseman and how she was written? Let us know in the comments.

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