The Simpsons

The Simpsons made adult animation a form rather than an experiment, and BoJack takes three specific things from it: talking animals treated as ordinary citizens with no explanation offered, dense visual gags in the background of scenes that are about something else, and a Hollywood satire that assumes the audience knows the industry. What Bob-Waksberg adds is consequence, letting characters remember what happened last season, which is exactly the thing The Simpsons refuses to do.

Same creator, and more usefully the same writers' room method: Groening and David X. Cohen built Futurama out of what The Simpsons had established, which was that an animated half hour could carry dense joke-per-second writing for adults and still have a family at the centre. The inherited structure is the dysfunctional workplace-as-family, the satirical present dressed as something else, and an emotional episode once a season that the show has earned the right to.