Tuca & Bertie

Tuca & Bertie is a 2019 adult animation show, created by Lisa Hanawait of BoJack Horseman fame. It premiered on Netflix on May 3, 2019.

Tuca & Bertie are best friends, polar opposites, and former roommates. They're dealing with Bertie moving in with her loyal boyfriend of five years, an architect named Speckle, as Tuca maintains six months' worth of sobriety. On the outside, Bertie likes being the normal friend with life goals, a passion for baking, and a desire for stability. She does wonder if she should fight for more out of life when a local baker offers her an apprenticeship. Meanwhile, Tuca struggles with her identity as the wacky wild friend, and worries if she'll ever be able to grow up.

Netflix canceled the show after one season. Cartoon Network later renewed Tuca & Bertie, premiering the second season on June 13, 2021. Season three premiered in summer 2022; shortly afterward in November 2022, Cartoon Network announced the show's cancellation, as Lisa Hanawait reported on Twitter.

Tropes used in Tuca & Bertie include:

Adult Fear: It's easier to find an episode that doesn't contain one of these moments:
- A coworker named Dirk harasses Bertie at work when she's trying to make small talk. When she goes to HR, the women in charge has a crush on the harasser and suggests that Bertie is being melodramatic. It takes Bertie confronting Dirk at a sexual harassment seminar for other women to reveal that he "goosed" them as well. Their easygoing boss in OOC Is Serious Business mode is so horrified that he suspends Dirk on the spot.
- Then there's Pastry Pete. The first episode hints that he's pretty reasonable, agreeing to Tuca's ridiculous croissant challenge to get back Speckle's sugar bowl and offering to hire Bertie on the spot after tasting her baking. (It's a long story.) When he agrees to take on Bertie as a part-time apprentice, he proceeds to manhandle her by holding her neck and forcing her to look at a boiling pot. Bertie doesn't know how to respond, blaming it on her "weird crush" on the guy. Another apprentice, Dakota, is better able to handle the situation when Pete tries the same shtick on her: she smacks him and tells him to get away, quitting on the spot. When she yells at Bertie for not warning her, Bertie has a breakdown and drives away from town for a week.
- Tuca has been six months sober, and constantly struggles with the fact that compared to Bertie, she is a hot mess. She has an existential crisis when Bertie and Speckle look at a potential house, wondering if she is going to be the constant loser friend and Bertie will move on without her. This revelation causes her to lash out at Bertie when the latter helps her get home from the hospital following emergency surgery because she overheard Bertie calling her clingy. Bertie doesn't apologize for this because, as she puts it, Tuca is needy.
- "The Flood" in the season two finale features this. Thanks to Tuca's siblings, the incompetent mayor twins, failing to stop the gentrifying moss from flooding into the failsafe, all of Bird Town ends up under water.
An Aesop: Season one has a running theme that being an adult doesn't mean you have all the answers, and Character Development means that you can always change for the better. Sure, Tuca is well-aware that she is immature and disorganized about her life, but as her internal Bertie tells her, she's still a brave person and a loyal friend when people need her. Bertie is forced to confront that she is not as mature and put-together as she thinks she is, and she needs to take charge of her life.
Bittersweet Ending: Most episodes of the show end this way:
- Bertie finally gets that promotion thanks to Tuca helping her expose Dirk as a sexual harasser. Tuca also gives her the final push to ask her boss for the manager job. She gets the office and the plaque...along with longer work hours and higher expectations. The episode ends with Bertie pondering if she made the right decision.
- When Speckle goes with Tuca to entertain her aunt at the latter's birthday and get some necessary funds, he bonds with her while sloshed and encourages Tuca to stand up for herself when Aunt Tallulah cannot be nice towards her niece. Tuca rips Aunt Tallulah's check when the latter insults her mother but realizes she needs the funds on the drive home. Speckle reassures Tuca that she'll find a way, and he considers her part of his and Bertie's family. Meanwhile, Bertie's day goes mostly fine, until Pastry Pete grabs her neck to make her look at a boiling pot. She proceeds to have a breakdown in the ladies' room.
- In the season one finale, Speckle and Bertie have made up in time for Molting Day, and their neighbors pitch in to help get Bertie's baking business, Sweet Beak, off the ground, delivering all the holiday pastries despite the rush. Tuca, however, finds out that Aunt Tallulah is in the hospital and her siblings didn't think to call her, meaning they completely forgot the annual call that she hates. Bertie also admits to Speckle and Tuca that one reconciliation isn't going to fix all the problems in her love life, so she needs to be a better girlfriend, and start confronting her trauma.
- In the season two finale "The Flood", Tuca finally has to confront that Kara has ghosted her and didn't actually care about her. She's saddened and wonders if that means that true love isn't meant for her. Bertie reassures her that's not the case, using what she learned in therapy to help Tuca work through her heartbreak. The flood nearly kills everyone, and destroys the house Speckle was renovating just as he was adding the finishing touches. Even so, it also kills the moss that was gentrifying the apartment, allowing some of the residents to move back into the apartments with minimal damage.
Calling the Old Man Out: Bertie actually calls out her parents in "Corpse Week" for how they pretend that nothing is wrong, and they have for years. They didn't get her any help for when she was molested, only a few sessions with a guidance counselor.
Could Have Avoided This Plot: In "Kyle," Bertie tries to keep it on the downlow that she sells pastries at work when not at her desk, to deal with work drudgery and obnoxious Dirk. She finds out at the episode there was no need for subterfuge; her boss says that he also has a side hustle, and everyone in the office does. They work out a deal where she's commissioned out of the office party budget to make birthday cakes for the staff. It gives her a reason to enjoy coming to the office and allows her to make peace with Dirk who has been annoying her all episode.
Early Installment Weirdness: The pilot has Speckle as the quirky one in the relationship as Bertie as the Only Sane Woman between him and Tuca. She's weirded out that his family keeps their remains in sugar and spice tins as traditions, and Speckle doesn't understand why she spits out the cookies she just baked when revealing his grandmother's ashes were in the sugar bowl. Later episodes had the roles reverse: Bertie is well-established as the quirky one in the relationship, and Speckle is the "rock" as he puts it bitterly in the season one finale. Season two would restore Speckle's quirky side, in his various subplots.
The Insomniac: "Nighttime Friend" reveals that Tuca has trouble sleeping every night. So she goes out for a long walk, visiting her mother's grave and sneaking alcohol to Aunt Tallulah in the hospital. She finally sleeps at the end of the episode when Kara sings a lullaby to her.
Let's Get Dangerous: In "The Flood," Dirk of all people reenters the Conde Nest building to rescue the company boss Holland. Let's repeat: he enters a rapidly flooded building navigates up a flight of stairs to the roof, carries Holland back down said flight of stairs, and evacuates him as Holland insists he must go down with the building.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: When a hospitalized Aunt Tallulah gives Tuca the power of attorney, Bertie explains that it means if anything happens to her aunt that mentally incapacitates her, Tuca has to make decisions on her behalf. As a result, it's a big responsibility. Tuca thinks about this, and realizes in good conscience she can't keep sneaking alcohol to Tallulah, and stops doing it. As a result, Tallulah gives Terry the power of attorney instead, showing she wanted a source of booze who was easy to manipulate.
Only Sane Man: Desmond Toucan. Tuca comes from a Dysfunctional Family where her oldest sister Terry is bitter about the fact that Tuca is still a kid, emotionally, and treats her like a child even when Bertie points out that Tuca has grown so much with sobriety. Terry's husband Thomas gets into regular fights with her about the disdain for his competitive raking. In the middle of all it, the smartest sibling, Desmond, stays out of the bickering. When he sees Bertie on the verge of an anxiety attack, he passes her a book she'll like, The Crepe Gatsby. She thanks him silently as she starts reading.
OOC Is Serious Business: In "The Dance," Speckle immediately pegs that something is wrong if Tuca hasn't been at her apartment for three weeks while Bertie has been crashing there, and they haven't had a fight. Bertie distracts him by showing an app that would predict how their children would look. Later, however, they both notice that Tuca is not acting like herself at the carnival and is too casual about how Kara is cutting them all down.
Parents as People:
- Terry has had to be an adult since hers and Tuca's mother died. As a result, she's very uptight with her daughter Tulip, especially when Tuca visits. While she has a point that Tuca doesn't know how to be repsonsible, Tuca also has to point out that Tulip is scared of her own mother.
- Bertie's parents are revealed to have a hoarding problem in "Corpse Week", owing to the fact that they don't talk about serious issues, like open-breast surgery. They also insist that Bertie doesn't need therapy because she's "normal". Bertie, who normally wants to avoid conflict, is actually miffed by this and calls them out. Turns out they ignored her needs after she got molested as a child, refusing to send her to a therapist or press charges against the lifeguard.
Reality Ensues:
- The penultimate season one episode features Tuca insisting that she and Bertie drive to Bertie's family cabin at Jelly Lakes, saying they both deserve a vacation. During this time, Bertie ignores her phone calls while finally having an epiphany about being molested by a lifeguard the day she was planning to swim to Peanutbutter Island. When she drums up the courage to answer Speckle, she drops her phone. She and Tuca return with the epiphany...and Speckle tears her a new one. He says he was worried sick about her, scared that she was dead until her new phone arrives in the mail. She also nearly missed Molting Day, and they lost their window to pick out holiday decorations. Speckle reveals that he loves Bertie, but he can't be her emotional support and not receive support in return; he bought a teardown house and started renovating it to deal with the stress. While Speckle eventually forgives Bertie after she visits him at the teardown and says she loves it, Bertie also admits that it was cruel of her to ghost him for a week. Season 2 opens with Bertie seeking therapy to avoid burdening Speckle that much again. When she finally tells Speckle.
- How the Pastry Pete arc starts again in Season 2. While there was video evidence of him harassing Bertie that discredited him, he wasn't going to go away forever. Pete is a celebrity baker who knows how to market himself and blackball competitors. As one of his customers put it, so many men have been accused that it's hard to keep them straight and are they supposed to be punished forever after they say sorry? Bertie says aloud men like that should be exiled to an island so she won't have to see them again, but thinks it through and realizes that's impossible to implement. The most she can do is try to warn Pastry Pete's newest manager about his behavior and her accidentally sabotaging the batter, which leads to the stressed woman shouting at her, and fight back on her terms: cut an exclusive baking deal with her boss.
- In "Kyle," Tuca decides to try and find her passion. She realizes she's good at directing traffic at a busy interaction with no stop signs or traffic lights. For a few days, Tuca gets into the position of a volunteer crossing guard. Just as she gets Drunk With Power and drop-kicks ducklings into the nearby pond, new stop signs get installed. As the construction guys relay, the signs had to be there earlier due to city regulations. Tuca was just a self-employed volunteer.
- The season 2 premiere has Tuca tell Bertie to not go to therapy; just do what she does and scream her feelings into a jar and hide it behind the toilet. Tuca maintains this method works, even as her relationship with Kara starts to founder. In "The Flood," as the stress of the titular flood and Kara ghosting her gets to Tuca's mind, she has a breakdown and refuses to leave her apartment when the water rushes in and fills the rooms. Bertie has to physically pull her onto a damaged door to get her to safety. The only thing that helps Tuca become more functional is talking about most of her repressed feelings in the jars. Even some are too hard for Bertie to unpack, like Tuca feeling guilty that she's angry that her mother died and left her.
- A positive one; when Bertie goes to therapy, she worries that she's not getting better. Her therapist has to point out that you can't chart growth overnight; it's gradual and natural. Sure enough, while Bertie hasn't gone through all her feelings, she's able to use what she learned in therapy to comfort Tuca when the latter finally has a breakdown about the fact that Kara doesn't love her the way that Tuca loves Kara, and Kara ghosted her in the middle of a citywide disaster.
- In season three, Kara has pulled a Heel Face Turn, having gone to a therapist to deal with her emotionally abusive and toxic tendencies. She also assists Tuca when the latter collapses at a wedding, getting her to a hospital. Doesn't mean that Tuca, Bertie and Speckle have forgiven her; part of the collapse on Tuca's part was the emotional reminder that Kara ghosted her during a crisis. Bertie takes time to yell at Kara for forgetting her name, and Speckle stares with disapproval.
Skewed Priorities: Played for Drama during "The Flood at three key points:
- The twin mayors would rather argue and let the moss take over the city during the flood rather than implement necessary funds for evacuation. It says something that Tuca, their baby sister, admits they're shitty leaders.
- Tuca wants to find Kara and make sure she's not hurt. Bertie has to point out it's normal for Tuca to worry about her girlfriend, but if they stay in the city rather than get to Speckle's fixer-upper, they will drown. She's aghast when Tuca risks drowning, knowing that Tuca is not a strong swimmer, to get to Kara's lighthouse apartment.
- And where was Kara during all this? Partying on a medical boat with the other nurses, when she was either supposed to be working or evacuating. Tuca is heartbroken that Bertie ended up being right, that Kara was just using her as a punching bag. Kara herself seems to realize she has no defense for this selfishness.
This Is Reality: A therapist in the season 2 premiere is amused when Bertie tries speed-dating her and other experts to find the perfect person to treat her short-term problems. Bertie asks if she's the best psychologist possible for handling her panic attacks. The therapist explains that you can be the most famous and well-educated psychologist in the world, but that does squat if the methods and personality don't help the patient. Even if the patient is completely compliant with CBT, psychoanalysis, or crystal therapy, not all disciplines work the same way. This discussion makes Bertie realize that this therapist was the one she wanted at the end of the episode because this woman was the most honest that she may not be the best fit for Bertie but her advice helped regardless.
Yank the Dog's Chain: Speckle has just finished fixing up the teardown that he bought using a predatory solo loan to pay for the materials and labor. Bertie is thrilled that this is real, that they have a dream house. Then the flood happens, nearly drowning Speckle, and destroying the house. Speckle represses his trauma about it to deal with the near-drowning but saved the doorknob that Bertie liked.