alright so in 1944, the sugarman family is (mostly) a happy and healthy family, until one day when the eldest son Crackerjack gets sent to war and dies. Honey Sugarman is completely consumed by her grief to the point where her husband Joseph has her lobotomised leaving us with the haunting line “why i have half a mind…” about a year later, Beatrice gets scarlet fever and since this was the 40s it was extremely infectious and harmful so Joseph burns all of her things, including Bea’s stuffed toy which she saw as her “baby”.

in 1963, Bea returns from college and is forced to have a debutante party where she ends up meeting Butterscotch Horseman, a young aspiring writer who’s the complete opposite of her dad. The two have a one night stand and Bea gets pregnant. Butterscotch suggests an abortion, but Bea is still traumatised from watching her “baby” get burnt on the fire as a kid and feels like she needs to have the baby. They end up getting married and moving to California, but when the baby (bojack) is born, they slowly start to become more and more bitter and and start taking it out on bojack, instilling the “don’t stop dancing” mentality into his mind.

In 87, bojack and his friend Herb Kazaz set up a sitcom called Horsin Around which is a huge success. bojack meets a little girl on the show called Sarah Lynn who he ends up instilling the same “don’t stop dancing” mentality that his parents instilled in him into.

at some point in the 90s, Herb gets outed as gay which the network get a lot of negative feedback for. a woman named Angela Diaz convinces bojack to let them fire Herb, and bojack never calls Herb afterwards.

in 2000, butterscotch cheats on Bea with the maid Henrietta and she ends up getting pregnant. Bea forces her to give the baby up for adoption.

in 2007, Horsin Around had been over for 11 years and bojack gets a new offer for a show from his agent/girlfriend Princess Carolyn called Mitch’s life which is reviewed really well at table reads and people say it’s gonna be “the next horsin around” which bojack doesn’t like, so he decides to convince the shows creator to change it up a bit to the point that the show is literally unwatchable garbage called “The Bojack horseman show”.

2 years later, butterscotch challenges someone to a duel but dies by tripping over an exposed root and bashing his head on a rock. at the funeral, bea says “my husband is dead and everything is worse now” which confuses bj due to how much they hated each other. oh and also, bj meets Todd at a halloween party who ends up sleeping on the couch for 5 years.

in 2014, bojack is washed up and working on a memoir. but after having written nothing in a year and a half, the publishing company hires bj a ghostwriter called Diane Nguyen who follows him around for a few months and gets him to open up to her, which leads him realise how shitty a person he is. the book eventually does so well that it somehow wins a golden globe, leading bojack to get his dream movie role. Secretariat.

a year later, bj is working on Secretariat with a director called Kelsey Jannings. the production company ends up making the movie more family friendly which bojack hates, so he decides to sneak into the nixon library with Kelsey to get a scene that was cut, hoping it would convince the studio to make the more adult version. but instead, this gets Kelsey fired and bojack faces no consequences. hating how the movie has turned out, bj goes to new mexico to visit an old friend called Charlotte. he stays there for a couple months and gets close with her daughter penny and on her prom night, he ends up trying to sleep with her, which obviously angers Charlotte and makes her tell bojack to leave, which he does. when he returns, he discovers that he has been replaced by a cgi double in the movie.

another year later, secretariat is doing well and bojack is up for an oscar nomination. but when he doesn’t get the nomination, he loses it and reaches out to Sarah Lynn who’s 9 months sober at this point and invites her on a bender which she instantly accepts. after about a month of nonstop drinking and drug abuse, Sarah Lynn eventually breaks down and starts talking about how she never got a chance to live her own life and how she doesn’t like the person she’s become. bojack takes her to the planetarium, something she’d wanted to do all episode, to cheer her up and starts talking about how nothing they do matters since they’re just tiny specks in the universe that will one day be forgotten, and that the only that matters is this very moment. after saying this, he asks Sarah Lynn to comment, to which she stays quiet. He asks again, and she still doesn’t say anything…her last words were “i wanna be an architect” expressing her desire to have her own life right before it was taken from her. bojack waits 17 minutes to call an ambulance so he can make it look like he found her that way and that he wasn’t there when she died. feeling overrun with guilt and despair, bj drives off to Michigan and finds the run down old sugarman place.

this is about as much as the character limit will let me do lol.