Warning: this post contains spoilers for season 6 of BoJack Horseman!
Netflix show BoJack Horseman, which recently began its sixth season, features a cast of mostly anthropomorphic animal characters—with the exception of one of its frontmost stars, Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie), a cynical feminist and writer/journalist/cycler through various media-related jobs. Last season, she divorced her husband, an enthusiastic golden lab named Mr. Peanutbutter, and she begins season 6 touring the country making videos for the online magazine she works for, GirlCroosh, and sometimes making out with her cameraman, a buffalo named Guy.
Diane’s my favorite character in the show, and I’ve often thought she wouldn’t be out of place at Mount Holyoke. She’s an ardent feminist who will always speak up about her beliefs, though sometimes at the cost of hurting her loved ones, and she’s constantly frustrated with how no one seems to listen to her (often sensible) suggestions. She also isn’t without a spiteful streak. For example, when she’s angry at her friend BoJack for comparing himself to her, she takes a damaging secret from his past and writes it into the script of the show he’s acting in, forcing him to act out the confession of his secret.
Her character takes an interesting turn in season 6. After four seasons of being married to Mr. Peanutbutter and a fifth recovering from the divorce (though that’s hardly all she did in season 5), she isn’t associated with him anymore. In fact, since she’s touring the country, she isn’t associated with the show’s central setting of Los Angeles at all. Realizing how unhappy she is in LA, she moves in with Guy, who lives in Chicago, and decides to begin working on a book of essays. The keyword being “decides”—she experiences a lot of difficulty actually doing it, because of the self-loathing and unhappiness she feels.
There’s one point where Guy comes home and is surprised to see her typing furiously, and she smiles, explaining how it was easier once she’d just forced herself to start and gotten into the flow. Guy nods, accepting this, and then we see a shot of the laptop screen she’s angled away from him: “I am terrible. I am terrible. I am terrible,” repeated over and over. It’s a brief but heartbreaking moment.
Her friend BoJack unexpectedly comes to visit her, flying all the way from LA to Chicago, and discovers that (with Guy being temporarily gone on another job) that the apartment is a disaster. He tries to tell Diane she needs to get help, but she doesn’t seem willing to listen. She mentions that in college, she’d taken Prozac, but on medication she hadn’t been herself, so she stopped taking it. I found this moment all too relatable—due to the side effects of an SSRI named Lexapro, my first semester of college was mostly spent sleeping, often taking 1-2 naps per day on top of sleeping at night for 10+ hours at a time while still feeling exhausted and disoriented while awake. While Lexapro did make me feel better emotionally, the opportunity cost was far too low to make it worth it, so the way Diane spoke about her own depression deeply resonated with me. There’s also a really touching shot of BoJack, who suffers from depression himself, picking up the garbage littering the apartment and placing it in a garbage bag. By the time he flies back to LA the next day, the apartment is clean again. It’s an important illustration of how to be a good friend to a person suffering from depression, and it’s especially great considering that BoJack suffers from depression too, so there’s that point of mutual understanding.
I’m really excited to see how Diane’s character develops this season and what her new life in Chicago will be like. This is the final season of the much-beloved show, and so far, it’s done a great job—I’m hyped to see how it’ll be wrapped up!
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