Because I live in DC, and also because of climate change, I haven’t seen snow in a while. As a committed cold-weather lover, this has been a real bummer. Luckily there’s some nice snow in Bob’s Burgers, a cartoon I watch, uh, a lot.
Over the last… OK I’ll admit it, few years, I’ve developed this habit of falling asleep on the couch in front of either Bojack Horseman or Bob’s Burgers, as a way to stop myself from lying awake thinking all night. It’s not a great tendency, surely bad for both my mental health and my sleep schedule. I keep trying to break it; I’ll be getting ready for bed and say to myself, “Now, are we going to sleep in our big boy bed tonight?” like I’m trying to wrangle a child, and then I’ll end up on the couch anyway, nestling into whatever episode of cartoons I have seen a distressing number of times.
(If you are Hulu and are reading this, please don’t institute a Netflix-style “Are you still watching?” button. I feel weird enough about this without both platforms nagging me.)
I was watching the latest episode of Bob’s Burgers last night, in which the Belcher family visits a mountain cabin, and I was struck by how lovely the animated snow looked falling on their car windshield, dissolving against the glass in this wonderfully realistic way.
Wasn’t there just another episode with nice snow? I thought, before realizing that this was the Season 8 Christmas episode I’d fallen asleep to the night before.
Both these snowfalls have this wonderful airy quality to them, but they’re still heavy; they’re the kind of snowstorm you probably don’t want to get caught in unprepared, but which wouldn’t actually be so bad to be out in. (At least not if you’re me, a person whose first instinct upon seeing snow is to run around in it.)
The Thanksgiving episode in Season 6 has similar snow, but it’s meant to be a bad storm. I’m not quite sure it evokes the kind of blizzard you’d be concerned about, but I love the quality of light in it: that exact pale hue the air gets in a certain kind of snowstorm. It feels so much like the storms of my childhood.
The show’s snow has such a distinct physical presence, and it’s so evocative of the feeling of snow days as a kid, which is apt for a show focused on a family. Bob’s Burgers' winter episodes tend to see more snow than the Northeast sees lately (the show appears to take place in New Jersey), but I like that this gives it a sort of timeless quality that’s echoed by its narrative. Unlike The Simpsons, which, by addressing modern issues, has to retcon its characters’ pasts until Marge and Homer were young in multiple eras, Bob’s Burgers remains vaguely modern without ever being specific. Maybe that’s one of the things that makes it such a comfort watch for me. It’s a self-contained world where none of the stuff that keeps me awake at night can encroach.
(This theory doesn't hold up when you consider that Bojack is my other comfort watch, but... I don't know, brains are weird.)
DC is forecasted to have a lot of snow this winter, or whatever qualifies as “a lot” and “snow” in this bit of the country. So maybe sometime soon I’ll be able to get my energy out in a real-life snowy romp and then fall asleep in my actual bed.
