Western Animation / HouseBroken

It's The Secret Life of Pets, but for adults.

"I'm in the doghouse ‘cause I let the cat out of the stupid bag.
Like, every winter, let the chicken out and drop off like a flag.
'Cause something's smelling mighty fishy this time of year.
Monkey see, monkey do, hold your horses I'll take two.
Woofin' around. Woofin' about.
I'm gonna make you a mess 'cause I love you."

— The intro to the Christmas episodes in season 2

Have you ever wondered what really goes on in our pets' minds? Are they just as neurotic and emotionally complex as us humans? And where would they go if they needed a place to vent all that personal baggage? The answer: group therapy, of course!

Making its network premiere on May 31, 2021 as part of Fox's 'Animation Domination' block, Housebroken is the brainchild of Clea DuVall, Gabrielle Allan, and Jennifer Crittenden (all of whom alumni of Veep), and centers around an all-star Ensemble Cast of Funny Animals.

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Contains examples of:

• Actor Allusion:
  • This isn't the first time Lisa Kudrow has played a therapist.
  • Kit Kat is purple, rebellious, and loves pranks, kind of like Amethyst from Steven Universe (also voiced by Micheala Dietz). These traits (minus the purple, also remind one of Dolly from 101 Dalmatian Street.
• Aerith and Bob: The names of the cast range from human names like Elsa, Max, and Tabitha to object names like Bubbles, Nibbles, and The Gray One. Justified since they're all pets.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Why Honey is drawn to a coyote.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: Honey in "Who's A Homeowner?" after her and Chief get a fancy new doghouse.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Kit Kat is purple, likely dyed that way by her owners.
• Animals Not to Scale: Diablo is ridiculously small for an Airedale Terrier, being small enough to fit in a purse (a plot point of "Who's Getting Up There") He's the same size as Elsa, a Corgi. Realistically he should be the same size as Honey.
• Animal Talk: Normally, all animals can speak to each other, but humans can't understand them. However, in "Who's Trippin'?", hallucinogenic drugs have somehow made Jill able to understand animals. Honey sees this as a bonding opportunity, but gets upset when Jill takes to Chief instead. Everything goes back to normal once the effect of the drugs wears off.
• Anthropomorphic Shift: In "Who's Afraid of Boomsday, Again?", Honey and Chief's dreams have them and the other animal characters walking on their hind legs and wearing clothes.
• Artistic License – Biology: In "Who's Getting up There?", Chief, a St. Bernard, age about 7 1/2- with life expectancy only 8-10 years- is oddly described as being in a "midlife crisis" by Honey.
• Ass Shove: In "Who's A Mole?", Chief refuses to take a pill that will help his UTI. He refuses all the treats the pill is hidden in out of the belief that holding out long enough, even if it's to the point of almost killing himself, will cause the "ultimate treat" to surface. Jill eventually gets so fed up that she resorts to shoving it up his butt, which Chief deems to be the treat he has been looking for.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: While the group isn't above belittling each other, in "Who's Wild", they stand up to the raccoon when he starts putting down Honey after showing no regret of letting The Gray One get caught by animal control and not informing everyone else about it.
• Baffled by Own Biology: Chico winds up being baffled when he inexplicably gives birth to a litter of kittens. It turns out he's biologically female, although he continues identifying as male.
• Betty and Veronica: Honey is basically married to Chief, a St. Bernard who's very sweet but has repulsive tendencies, but is also very interested in Coyote, who's exotic and dangerous.
• Both Sides Have a Point: In "Who's Did This?", while Chico is justified in being upset that The Grey One used him for food, you also can't really blame The Grey One either considering he and the other 39 cats he lives with are regularly under fed. Chico even acknowledges this when The Grey One apologizes.
• Cat Fight: Literally in "Who's The Boss?"
• Cat Up a Tree: In "Who's Wild?", Tabitha gets stuck up a tree trying to catch a bird.
• Centipede's Dilemma: In "Who's a Party Pony?", Honey finds out that a pony she counseled got "the yips" due to her advice. This makes Honey question how good she is as a therapist and freezes up during a group session.
• Christmas Episode: Season 2 starts with two, premiering back-to-back:
  • "Who's Found Themselves in One of Those Magical Christmas Life Swap Switcheroos?" has Honey being taken to the vet on Christmas and being mistaken for another poodle belonging to a rich couple. Meanwhile, Max escapes becoming the Christmas ham by his new owner, David Spade.
  • "Who's Having a Merry Thrashmas?" takes place the day after Christmas, which the pets call "Trashmas", where they get to turn over the garbage left from the big day.
• Cliffhanger: Episode 10 ends with Honey running away with the coyote after feeling unappreciated, Shel getting ran over by his owner and Ray Liotta planning to roast Max for a luau.
• Coming-Out Story: Parodied with Max's plot line in "Who's a Winner?", where he goes to a farm to do research for a movie role, and a former celebrity pig named Ennis makes him realize that, deep down inside, he's a "pig-pig"
• Cone of Shame: Honey has to wear a cone in "Who's the Cat-Chelorette?" after having a ruptured fatty deposit removed, which makes her ears more sensitive. She is able to hear another dog with a cone from a long distance away and develops a relationship with him. Turns out, however, that he's not a dog at all but a crocodile in the zoo who lures dogs to his habitat to eat; a pile of dog skeletons wearing cones can be seen in his habitat.
• Crazy Cat Lady: The Gray One is an alley cat who lives with an old lady with several other cats, spending the day watching movies.
• A Day in the Limelight: Elsa is given the chance to lead the group when Honey and Chief go to a kennel.
• Dogs Are Dumb: While averted with Honey and Elsa, this is played straight with Chief and downplayed with Diablo. In his first scene, Chief tries to go through the dog door with a long stick in his mouth, and despite Honey explaining that he needs to drop the stick to go in, he plows through anyway and is shocked to find the stick snapped in half, thinking there are now two sticks. Diablo's OCD and anxiety issues causes him to mistake a human baby for another dog but he eventually realized it.
• Dogs Hate Squirrels:
  • The title sequence shows the cast chasing after a squirrel.
  • In an Imagine Spot, Chief is soaking on a tub of peanut butter, the slogan for which is "Made in a facility that also kills squirrels".
  • Inverted in "Who's Going to the Vet?", where it's the squirrel who hates Honey, despite her attempts to have him join the group.
• Dream Episode: "Who's Afraid of Boomsday, Again?" has Honey and Chief being given sedatives to calm them during the Fourth of July fireworks. The medications give them dreams based on Thelma & Louise for Honey and Billy Jack Goes to Washington for Chief.
• Eyes Always Shut: The Gray One's right eye is missing, so it's always shut. In "Who's Wild?", it gets briefly replaced with a marble.
• Firehouse Dalmatian: One appears in "Who Got Burned?" Honey beats him up trying to go into a house fire to save The Gray One.
• Flea Episode: In "Who's Obsessed (a Lifetime Original)", Chico is feeling lonely until he meets a flea who offers to be his friend. Instead, he brings other fleas and have a never-ending party on Chico's body. After being exiled from the therapy group and the fleas getting some ticks added to the party, Chico asks for them to take it easy, but the lead flea instead declares that Chico's body is theirs now, and they eventually start to suck him dry. The Grey One saves him by putting him in a pool at the back of his home, whose water is toxic enough to burn the fur off Chico and kill off the fleas.
• Gag Haircut: In "Who Did This?", Honey goes to the groomer and is given a hairstyle that makes her head look like a cube. She is so embarrassed by it that she refuses to go outside to poop in fear that the coyote will see her, and she ends up pooping indoors.
• G-Rated Drug: In "Who's a Party Pony", Honey and a pony get high on sugar cubes, which they crush into powder and snort like cocaine.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Nibbles the classroom hamster is always on the verge of psychotic rage, and is known for having murdered her partner.
• Holiday Episode: "Who's Afraid of Boomsday?" takes place on July Fourth... or as the pets call it, Boomsday. It's a day they dread all year because of the loud fireworks, and see the usual trappings of Independence Day (Uncle Sam hats, hot dogs on star spangled plates, etc.) as dire warnings.
• Housepet Pig: One of the pets in Honey's therapy group is Max, a Berkshire pig belonging to George Clooney, who acts like a spoiled celebrity.
• Hulking Out: On "Who's Having a Merry Trashmas", Chico hulks out when he gets too hungry and goes on a rampage. It may have to do with him being a lab animal experimented on with gamma radiation.
• I Am Not Weasel: In "Who's the Boss?", Diablo is mistaken for a weasel after a haircut, even by other weasels. This works to his advantage at the end, when he scares away a rattlesnake that got inside the dog park due to his resemblance to the snake's natural enemy.
• I See Dead People: In "Who's Afraid of No Ghosts", Honey goes to see a psychic beaver because she's been doing readings with members of her therapy group, but in doing so she finds out that she can really see the spirits of dead animals. Soon, the ghosts of various relatives of the group flock to Honey to relay their messages, which drives her insane.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each episode is named as a question beginning with "Who...", following a theme of things you'd say to one's pet.
• Innocently Insensitive: Chief is this a lot to Honey.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • Honey develops a relationship with a wild coyote. This is Truth in Television, as there have been cases of dogs and coyotes breeding; Elsa notes that one of her own relatives ran off with one.
  • Subverted with Nibbles and Diablo. In "Who Done It?", after they share a tender moment, Nibbles asks Diablo if they should kiss but Diablo passes on it.
  • In a much more bizarre example, in the season one finale, there is a kangaroo and a octopus who hang out together in the woods and are implied to be in a relationship with each other (no, I am not kidding).
  • "Who's Having A Merry Trashmas?" manages to have one that might be even more bizarre than the kangapus romance (if that is somehow possible). Basically, Elsa falls in love with a robodog toy, but when its batteries run out, she thinks he died. When she makes it to Shel and Darla's egg clutch and the eggs hatch however, Elsa then believes robo has been reincarnated as one of the baby tortoises and snuggles with it. Naturally, Darla is weirded out by a dog flirting with her literal newborn daughter.
• Invisible Holes: In "Who's a Mole?", during a Training Montage at Raccoon's trust building camp, the group falls into a pit of porcupines. They are next seen drinking at a stream, with water squirting out of their bodies.
• Leader Wannabe: Elsa sees her role in the group as Honey's Lancer, which no one else agrees with.
• Marshmallow Hell: "Who Are You?" reveals that the Gray One's owner picks one of her cats as "Cat of the Day" and shoves it into her cleavage.
• The Mole: In "Who's the Mole?", someone has been giving away the secrets told during Honey's group sessions to a flock of birds who then "tweet" it to everyone. The group suspect Elsa and have her kicked out of the group, but then the real culprit turns out to be Honey herself, who was talking in her sleep due to the urinary tract infection medicines she was taking.
• Mushroom Samba: In "Who's Getting Up There?" Tabitha gets high on catnip and starts to hallucinate Felix The Cat-esque characters and sees all the humans as monsters, causing her to start a revolution at the Pretty Kitty cat show.
• My Greatest Failure: In "Who's a Winner", Elsa used to be a great competitive sheep herder, until she tried to herd her sheep between two bales of hay and they got stuck in the narrow pathway and somehow exploded. She blamed her competitive nature for the incident, and warns Honey when she starts getting caught up in the competition as well. In the end, Elsa redeems herself by herding lost sheep before they could run into a highway, and avoids another accident by ordering the sheep to go single file.
• Mystery Episode: The episode "Who Done It?" is about the group all being suspect of murdering Nathan, Jill's mother's pet parrot.
• Nice Mean And In Between: Out of Jill's pets, we have Honey as the nice one who is a caring, patient dog who wants to help her group the best she can, Bubbles the mean Deadpan Snarker who will heckle the animals any chance she gets, and Chief as the in-between, friendly but oftentimes Innocently Insensitive.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: A plot point will occasionally have the fourth wall broken to say something is real and not made up by the writers. Examples include ferrets on steroids being passed off as poodles by shady sellers and there being testicle implants for neutered dogs.
• Oblivious Adoption: "Who's Trippin'?" reveals that Chief has assumed that Jill is his actual mother. When Jill, who becomes able to talk to animals, informs him that she found him abandoned at the back of a feminist stripper club, he demands to be taken there to find his real mother.
• Oblivious to His Own Description: In "Who's the Cat-Chelorette?" Max takes Shel to a Hollywood party that hosts turtle races. In the end, Shel complains that all the turtles only want to talk about sex, while Max complains that the pets at the VIP section only talk about themselves.
• Odd Friendship: Invoked three times in the season one finale:
  • Firstly when Honey (a poodle) briefly befriends a rabbit who tries to help her find food.
  • Secondly with Tchotchke (a Loris) and Raccoon. Carrying on from The Stinger of "Who Done It?", Tchotch is one of the few animals that Raccoon actually seems to like.
  • But the weirdest one by far is the nameless kangaroo and octopus. They actually seem to take pride in the fact their friendship is so bizarre, as they feel a little threatened by the two above examples.
• Official Couple: Tabitha and The Gray One become a couple as of "Who Done It?".
• Pass the Popcorn: In "Who's The Boss?" Shel is seen eating popcorn during Tabitha and Kit Kat's fight.
• Playing Cyrano: In "Who's the Birthday Girl", the Grey One helps Raccoon court a koala at the zoo by feeding him lines while hiding behind a bush. He then appears to have feelings for her, but in reality, is only interested in eating her poop.
• Posthumous Character: Big Cookie, Honey's best friend. The pilot is about how Honey deals with her death.
• Potty Failure: In "Who Did This?", Honey doesn't go outside to poop because she's embarrassed by her new haircut. So, she holds it in all night, then involuntarily blasts a turd in the morning. The rest of the episode explores her anxiety over pooping indoors.
• Raging Stiffie: In "Who's Afraid of Boomsday?", Diablo is given an anti-anxiety medication that gives him an erection, which is heavily pixellated. As the medication wears off, the pixels gets smaller and smaller.
• Rascally Raccoon: In "Who's Wild?", Honey invites a raccoon to the therapy sessions, hoping he'll shake things up a little. Later, she discovers he was just using her to get himself and his pack inside the house to raid the fridge. He becomes a secondary character and a user of the Face–Heel Revolving Door from that point onwards.
• Replacement Goldfish: In "Who Are You?", Max discovers that he's actually a replacement pet, sending him into an identity crisis. Honey also mentions offhand that Bubbles is also a replacement (which comes as a shock to Bubbles).
  • In episode 10, Big Cookie's family get a puppy to replace her named Little Cookie. This adds to Honey's distress when Little Cookie prefers Chief's company over hers.
• Rewatch Bonus: A minor example. Chico's behavior and his owner Kevin's seeming neglect for him makes so much more sense once the season one finale reveals both that Kevin was a flight attendant and Chico wasn't his cat but rather his ex-girlfriend cat whom she abandoned.
• Road Apples: There's a lot of jokes about animals pooping. The second episode has Honey pooping inside the house as a plot point.
• The Runaway: Tabitha, following a suggestion by Elsa, runs away as a plea for attention. She ends up in a cat café, where she's known as Magnolia, and eventually winds up with the Gray One in his home.
• Scenery Censor: In "Who's The Boss" Diablo gets a new pair of fake testicles. They are censored by various objects and other characters throughout the episode.
• Siamese Twins: One of The Gray One's housemates are literal Siamese twin cats.
• The Silent Bob: Tchotchke doesn't speak, and mainly communicates with their parasol.
• Smelly Skunk: One tricks Chief into coming closer so she can spray him For the Lulz. He's apparently fallen for it before... and every time after.
  • In "Who's Getting Up There?" to rescue Diablo, Honey throws a skunk that sprays his kidnapper's car.
• Stalker with a Crush: In "Who's Obsessed (a Lifetime Original)", Chief meets Ruby, an Irish Setter who develops a crush on him. She starts out by beating up a dog who harasses Chief during their walk, then fakes being hit by Jill's car to get inside the house and get rid of Honey so she can have Chief all to hereself. Elsa learns from Raccoon that Ruby's real name is Cherry, and that she once killed a dog who wouldn't leave his mate for her by blowing up their house. Elsa arrives just in time to save Honey from being thrown off a deep cave by Cherry.
• Start My Own: In "Who's Going to the Vet?", Chief is taken to the veterinarian and bonds with the other patients. Honey, who has been trying to get Chief to join her therapy group, is happy that he's going to give it a try, only to be dismayed when he meant starting his own group with the pets from the vet office.
• Theme Naming: All the cats at The Gray One's place are named "The _ One" (ex. The Scabby One, The Duet One). When Tabitha moves in, she becomes "The Stuck-Up One"
• Theme Tune Cameo: In "Who Got Burned?" Shel sings the show's theme song.
  • At the end of "Who's Getting Up There"? a melancholy version of the "meow" portion of the theme song plays when an "in memoriam" tribute to all the Pretty Kitty cat show participants who died plays.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Chief (St. Bernard) and Honey (poodle) represent a canine equivalent. And when the well-groomed Tabitha and the one-eyed, scruffy Gray One become a couple, they form a feline equivalent.
• Unishment: In "Who's The Boss", Tabitha gets tired of Kit Kat's attitude and leaves her inside the Gray One's home, hoping a night with crazy feral cats will set her straight. By next morning, they have made Kit Kat their leader.
• Visual Pun: In the episode "Who's The Boss" Diablo gets a new pair of fake testicles, which are censored by various objects and characters throughout the episode. One of them is a squirrel holding up 2 nuts.
• White-Dwarf Starlet: Tabitha is a white Persian who used to be a Cute Kitten, but now has to deal with her owners' new kitten stealing the spotlight.
• You Mean "Xmas": The pets have their own version of Christmas named Trashmas. It takes place the day after, when all the garbage cans are full of garbage left over from Christmas which the pets get to overturn.
• Your Tomcat Is Pregnant: In "Who's a Good Therapist?", Chico, who presents as a male overweight tomcat, is revealed to be pregnant as he starts giving birth to a litter of kittens in the middle of a session. It comes as a big surprise to everyone, including Chico.
  • Strangely, this is ignored in the holiday special, as after seeing him have a hangry, destructive fit, Tabitha becomes quite smitten with Chico. Justified, perhaps, as The Grey One mentioned he/she, as a kitten, was subjected to gamma radiation as part of a secret government experiment, which may have profoundly affected his/her body.

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