Content warning: this piece discusses trauma, CSA, and mental disorders. This piece also contains spoilers for the second season of Tuca and Bertie.
The second season of Tuca and Bertie frames the show for its new Adult Swim audience by having Bertie (Ali Wong) explain her biography, her closest relationships, and her general worries in a therapist’s office. Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) doesn’t feel therapy is necessary when her solution is pouring all of her bad feelings into a cup and putting it behind the toilet. The episode splits between Bertie trying out several new therapists while Tuca creates a gameshow for herself to find the perfect partner. When Bertie goes into a full blown panic attack, Tuca sacrifices everything she built up to help Bertie out of a funk but it leaves her with a lingering pain. She yells into a cup then leaves the following line: “Bertie is keeping me alone.”
Over the course of 10 episodes, we spend a lot of time watching Tuca and Bertie going off in different directions. Tuca discovers a passionate, but tense relationship with fellow night owl Kara (Sasheer Zamata) while Bertie anxiously worries her friendship could fall apart as her boyfriend Speckle (Steven Yeun) is perfecting their future house. We get to learn so much new backstory about their respective families that puts so much of their flaws into context. There are many subjects that Tuca and Bertie covers with brilliant precision from gentrification, toxic relationships, and the dangers of inertness. However what cannot be overstated is the role therapy plays in allowing the main characters to confront their issues.
I’ve been going to a therapist off-and-on for the past seven years. I made the decision to see one soon after I graduated from university after realizing that my presumptions of ADHD might be more real than I could have imagined. My university has a program dedicated to finding mental health services for students/alumni and I’ve been incredibly fortunate that the very first therapist I met with was someone who I connected with instantly. For the kind of person that I am, I would engage in CBT or Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which is a fancy term for creating coping strategies through discussing thoughts and feelings. It took several sessions of trying to find the right medicine but I definitely feel I’m in a much healthier mental space than I used to be. Re-watching the second season of Tuca and Bertie reminded me of so many things I’ve directly talked about from personal fears to family concerns.
One of the most critical things to understand about getting mental health treatment is that every person’s brain is wired differently. What works for one person may not work for someone else, even if you share the same wild backstory, or even the same disorder. This creates so much doubt in the mental health community where you’ll hear one bad experience after another from different kinds of SSRIs or coping mechanisms. Both characters want to overcome their problems as possible, but what the show underlines throughout the season is that therapy, be it professional or personal, is an ongoing, ever-changing process.
And that’s the god honest truth when it comes to unpacking your psychological worries. Even after several sessions where I would make a major breakthrough, a new issue I was not considering would emerge from the ground. Even as these feelings spring up, there are so many discoveries I have made that overcome my paralyzing indecisiveness: lessons on creating boundaries, reinforcing my morals, learning to do things for myself, and reflecting on real aspects of my identity.
Simple questions like “Who am I?” “What do I want?” “What happens after that?” are incredibly powerful statements that help you process in a contained environment. When Bertie finally finds the right therapist with Dr. Joanne (Pamela Adlon), she begins to find answers normally restricted by her introverted nature.
For example, Bertie overcomes a major traumatic obstacle in the fifth episode, “Vibe Check.” One of the most notable scenes from last season featured Speckle and Bertie practicing some role-play that unintentionally triggers Bertie causing them to stop. When she starts having sexual fantasies about her former boss/abuser Pastry Pete (Reggie Watts). Bertie fears that her brain is broken because of the CSA she suffered. Dr. Joanne rebuffs those fears by explaining that arousal can be a healthy way of coping by creating a “corrective emotional experience.” Although Bertie leaves her therapist feeling worse, she eventually builds up the courage to talk to Speckle about these issues. Speckle understands this, reaffirming that Bertie shouldn’t feel ashamed because of how these sexual moments come out. Even though Bertie is aware the trauma she suffered can’t fully go away, she finds a way to manage it by now engaging positively in rougher role-play with Speckle. It’s one of several beautiful undercurrents that the show explores in its constant engagement with emotions.
There’s also a question raised throughout the season of whether or not Tuca and Bertie share a bit of unhealthy co-dependence. So many of their individual decisions require reinforcement and reassurance from one another to deal with any issue. You start to wonder if Bertie is too needy when texting Tuca or if Tuca just uses Bertie as an excuse to divert attention away from her real problems. Even the tightest friendships can be worn out by stacking emotional pressure onto one another and in the age of quarantine, I’ve really come to notice how easy it is to take our friends, partners, or communal spaces for granted as personal therapists.
What I would consider to be the most valuable aspect of Cognitive Behavior Therapy is that you create the conversation to reflect on what’s bothering you. The amount of information you’ve given to that professional is what they have to work with. As the details unfold, you start to realize all kinds of issues you’ve never talked about in public that you’re finally talking to someone about. A good therapist knows when to listen and when to point out a potential revelation in the moment. There’s no bias; no fear that you’ll hurt others by uttering out the words in a safe space of meditation. It’s why I recommend that everyone should try out therapy if you don’t have the confidence to speak about some issues openly. This is a subject rarely covered on television in such a nuanced portrayal, let alone in an adult animated cartoon.
I was thrilled that Tuca and Bertie hadn’t missed a beat from the first season, especially in the way the animation style will shift to go into flashback or place an exclamation point on a particular moment. The penultimate episode “The Dance” is nothing but buildup to a poetic release of Tuca introspecting on her relationships. All of creator Lisa Hanawalt’s greatest strengths come forward in this moment. The outlandish, freewheeling animation mixed with a simple splash of colors explodes in this raw performance of love and expression. “Eso Que Tu Haces” hits you with a devastating emotional bullseye that’s got more layers than a 20 year old candy egg. (PS: If you really want to feel your heart torn out, look up the translation to the lyrics.)
Lisa Hanawalt has been incredibly open about how the show mirrors aspects of her personal life. She created a comic about her love for British Period Dramas that’s the center for an episode in the first season. In a profile written by Coralie Kraft for the New Yorker, Hanawalt spoke on having several nightmares where her limbs would fall off, which is the greatest manifestation of Bertie’s anxieties. The most notable example in this season comes from the robbery in “Planteau” that directly came from a trip to New Orleans where she put herself in danger to save her sketchbook.
As I read her older material, There’s so much honesty that comes from Hanawalt’s work. The roots of Tuca and Bertie are deep within these stories. Her comics capture this very genuine cartoonist approach to life from weird obsessions to existential pondering contained by a self-disparaging playfulness. It frustrates me that Tuca and Bertie lives in the shadow of Hanawalt’s other show Bojack Horseman, because the familiar style and themes makes viewers trepidatious that they’ll be stumbling into crushing sadness. While I personally find the depictions of suffering in the latter to be somewhat indulgent and maudlin, the former has this rich emotional core that focuses on overcoming adversity through a more playful yet never demeaning manner. The second season might not be as gut-busting funny as the first, but everything about this absurd animated world is still embraced to its most creative, cartoonish potential.
The season ends with “The Flood” where a calming narrator (Whoopi Goldberg) talks about the history of a great flood hitting Bird Town. The moss built up throughout the series causes the levees to break causing everything to spill outward especially Tuca’s depression manifesting as ghosts. Just as Bertie doubts the therapy isn’t helping, she helps Tuca unpack all of her overwhelming worries by using CBT techniques.
What I feel is fantastic here, as well as incredibly accurate, is that each issue doesn’t have the same answer. Tuca realizes that while her sobriety is beneficial; it’s okay to admit that she did feel some comfort in drinking. She understands that the sad TV commercial she watched was just an advertisement for trucks. When Bertie pulls out the cup that says “Weird Emotions About Mom,” Tuca goes off talking about the difficulties of grieving for her death and feeling so angry about her absence. Tuca realizes that the guilt will persist because it’s too complex so she makes the seriously mature option to calm that issue down to deal with it again another day. So much of this episode feels powerfully raw and real thanks to Tiffany Haddish’s performance where she portrays the entire gamut of emotions.
I also think there’s a really clever moment where Tuca has an outburst when Bertie tries to use the phrase “It Is What It Is” as a way to handle the emotions. That’s something I hear older people say all the time when trying to deal with the weight of the world. It’s a thought-ender; to push the worries to something beyond our control…but for those of us who will be on the Earth for a while, it doesn’t work very well as a band-aid.
The culmination for everything this season is about hits when Tuca and Bertie finally overcome the flood. Tuca gets rejected by Kara with the coldest of cold shoulders fearing that her problems are too much to overcome. Bertie tells her she’s not alone with a hug and a joke, then Tuca’s final depression ghost disappears. This time Bertie has provided Tuca the emotional foundation to move on, strengthening their friendship even further. Before the literal book closes on Bird Town, the two look back at how therapy helped them make it to this point.
Tuca and Bertie has been confirmed for a third season. I’m infinitely grateful that this one-of-a-kind show gets to exist in a stressful, post-satire world, though if the show were to end, I’d at least feel the comfort in knowing that these characters came to a new level of mutual love. The value this show has given discussing therapy via emotional storytelling brings me such elation, that the writers really care about the feelings of their viewers. Through mindfulness and maintenance, Tuca and Bertie show us the way to ride out the storm.
