You may get the feeling, watching Netflix’s “Tuca & Bertie,” that you’ve seen these two birds somewhere before. How could you not? The series, which arrives Friday, is created by “BoJack Horseman” producer and artist Lisa Hanawalt. It shares with “BoJack” a similar look and a roster of talking, paycheck-earning, occasionally depression-spiraling anthropomorphic animals.
But there’s another similarity to a recent TV great. This buddy/birdie comedy, pairing an extroverted, body-positive toucan and an introverted, ambitious song thrush, brings back a kind of yin-yang feminist friendship that departed when Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer left Comedy Central earlier this spring.
Farewell, “Broad City”; hello, bird city. Or rather, Bird Town, the kaleidoscopic metropolis where Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) is moving upstairs from her former roomie Bertie (Ali Wong), as Bertie moves in with Speckle (Steven Yeun), an architect so chipper and straight-arrow he has an “I Actually Like Mondays” mug.
The two pals are 30 years old, the crux age for asking, or avoiding, what-am-I-doing-with-my-life questions. (The last season of “Broad City” kicked off its final, moving-on phase with Abbi’s 30th birthday.) Tuca’s more of an avoider, working temp gigs, cashing checks from a wealthy aunt (Jenifer Lewis) and living by the philosophy, “Nothing belongs to anyone.”
And Bertie — she’s an asker, a worrier, a rules-follower, currently tying herself in knots over whether to leave her data processing job at a magazine company (Condé Nest, obviously) and pursue her dream career as a baker.
Bird Town is a looser, stickier, more boho environment than the sleek, manicured Hollywoo of “BoJack,” and the series is decidedly, and overtly, more female-centric. (“BoJack” is about a successful middle-aged creep; “Tuca & Bertie” about fledgling bird-women who occasionally get creeped on by middle-aged guys.) And the difference is made concrete in Hanawalt’s trippy, exhilarating world-building.
For starters: the breasts. They’re everywhere — bouncing on the sides of buildings in the opening credits, on plants (the show is anatomically detailed but biologically creative), on pastries. In its conception and especially in its art, the world of “Tuca & Bertie” is thoroughly carnal. The features of the city are curvy and organic; snakes wend down train tracks and through the windows of apartment buildings. The art undulates and pulses; even the inanimate objects seem to breathe.
This everything-is-alive fleshiness fits the series’ stories, which, both the comic and more serious ones, involve the characters’ relationships with their own bodies. Tuca is earthy and sexual, living in short shorts and comfortable with bodily effluvia. Bertie is self-conscious and seems to constantly dread exposure, an anxiety whose psychological roots form the arc of the season.
Where much of the comedy of “BoJack” depends on placing animals in civilized human situations, the spirit of “Tuca & Bertie” is that even the most housebroken of beings are still ruled by DNA. Hanawalt matches species to character ingeniously. Pastry Pete (Reggie Watts), a pretentious baker who mentors Bertie, is a ramrod-stiff penguin. There are sentient plants, who are graceful, mysterious and intimidatingly cool (they make great mean teenagers). A mansplaining, idea-stealing, boorish male co-worker of Bertie’s is, naturally, a cockerel.
Some folks embrace their animality more easily than others, as when Tuca, on a whirlwind stint as a temp in Bertie’s office, pushes her friend to assert herself. (“Two words, Bertie: confidence!”)
Their introvert-extrovert dynamic is the most familiar aspect of the show, and early on “Tuca & Bertie” seems to want to cheerlead more than challenge its leads. But the characterization deepens as the 10-episode season moves on. Brassy Tuca — introduced as “friend, hero, connoisseur of snacks” — reveals a more melancholy, self-doubting side, and there’s real nuance to the way Bertie confronts her learned passivity.
What really distinguishes the show, though, is Hanawalt’s surreal vision, the anarchic fluidity of the landscape, the series’ whimsically bending laws of both nature and physics. Sometimes the show’s imagination is comically playful: When Tuca meets a hot guy working at the local deli, she’s so shaken that her bones leap out of her body, a Looney Tunes visualization of horniness.
Elsewhere, the zaniness turns poignant. Flashbacks and memories are rendered in puppetry and stop-motion, a visual break that creates the impression of the characters standing outside their own lives, as if observing other people. Bertie, in a moment of crisis, meets and embraces her childhood self, a faceless silhouette.
Funny as the dialogue in “Tuca & Bertie” can be, what stuck with me most after the season was over were the images. One of those involved Pat (Isabella Rossellini), an owl-woman who creates intricate, memory-based dioramas in the inside of eggshells — the tough vessels, filled with sustaining goo, from which life emerges.
These hauntingly pretty works feel a bit like “Tuca & Bertie” — a hallucinatory, messy story, about two bird-women exploring their past and future, that crawls inside its own egg and finds art.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.