TV Rewind: Bojack Horseman Remains the Best Depiction of Depression in Media Thanks to Diane Nguyen

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:

Bojack Horseman is utterly peerless. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s creation is the single most human show to have ever graced the small screen—and its star is an anthropomorphic animated horse. For every frame that bursts with animal puns, there’s a line of dialogue that guts you like a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s relentlessly inventive with its medium, from the hyper-specific structure of its seasons (the 11th episode is always the most devastating, each season is only allowed one use of the “f-word,” and so on) to its experimental bottle episodes (see Season 4’s “Fish Out of Water,” which was almost entirely absent of any spoken language, or Season 5’s “Free Churro,” which took the opposite tack and instead made the entire episode a single 20-minute long eulogy) to how thoroughly it took advantage of myriad forms of animation to portray different states of mind and inebriation. But more than anything else, Bojack Horseman is a six-season character study, and a phenomenal one at that. It’s been rightfully and frequently lauded as one of the best—if not the best—depictions of mental illness and addiction in recent media history, given that its titular horse (played with gravelly verve by Will Arnett) struggles immensely with both. 

However, it’s not Bojack alone that puts the Netflix original’s portrayal of depression in a class all its own; while the show’s treatment of Bojack’s self-destructive misery is incredible in its own right, both the horse and his many problems are not quite the first of their kind. Bojack is undoubtedly the very best of his archetype—which is richly deserving of praise in itself, given how many Prideful Problematic Men With Issues scowl their way onto our screens (and how few of them are legitimately interesting, well-written characters whose consequences are reckoned with)—but he’s an archetype nonetheless. The washed-up, miserable celebrity is a classic trope, as is the cynical, caustic, too-smart-for-his-own-good man who destroys everything he touches, and while Bojack is so good it turns these cliches on their head, it can’t be the titular horse alone that makes the show’s portrait of depression so uniquely resonant, so comprehensive and thorough. What truly sets Bojack’s study of mental illness apart is its refusal to stop at Bojack himself; depression is not one-size-fits-all, and Bojack Horseman understands that more than any other media I’ve had the pleasure of consuming. Case in point: the characterization of the show’s arguable deuteragonist, Diane Nguyen (voiced by Alison Brie). 

Diane Nguyen does not seem particularly interesting in the show’s early episodes—but then, neither does Bojack Horseman itself, as it ingeniously spent the first half of Season 1 relying on adult animation tropes, gags, and beats (a la Rick and Morty) all for the express purpose of subverting every expectation before the season’s end. Diane, who entered the show as the ghostwriter Bojack hired to help author his memoir, originally seemed to play the role of the appealing, competent, slightly nerdy woman who inspires the cynical male anti-hero to be a better person, Manic Pixie Dream Girl-style. Endearingly awkward and sharply feminist, Diane was likable, but didn’t seem like much more than every other “voice of reason” female sidekick. This quickly changes; by the third season, she’s neck-deep in a depressive episode, crashing on Bojack’s couch for two months as her self-image crashes down around her.

The series emphasizes that Diane is just as troubled as Bojack, albeit in different ways; gradually, it becomes evident that she spends her days desperately trying to avoid confronting the fact that she may not be the person she thought she was. She spent much of the first few seasons attempting to convince herself she was simply unhappy with her unsatisfactory environment, but it becomes clear that the pervasive feeling of emptiness might, in fact, have less to do with her surroundings than the one constant within them: Diane herself. It’s particularly rare to see a female depiction of depression that is as thorough, honest, and subtle as Diane’s: she is not sobbing all the time, not self-harming or refusing to eat. Bojack can afford to externalize his depression, both literally and metaphorically, but Diane, who has spent her life fighting tooth and nail to be taken seriously despite her gender, can’t allow hers to so much as surface. But, despite her best efforts, it does.

Diane Nguyen is not a perfect character: after all, she is a Vietnamese-American woman played by a white actress (which the show has very much gone on record as regretting), and whose ethnicity wasn’t meaningfully addressed until the show’s fifth season. But as precarious as that aspect of her characterization is, Diane herself is crucial to Bojack Horseman’s central project. She’s much more than a friend, love interest, or even foil to Bojack himself; she’s a delayed mirror, a reflection with a lag. We watch Bojack struggle through his long-standing awareness of his own misery at the same time as we watch Diane struggle to acknowledge her own—it’s the same journey, but Bojack embarked on it prior to the show’s start, while Diane gradually falls backward into it as the show progresses. The same journey, but not the same manifestations of it, nor the same destinations. 

After finally admitting she might be struggling with depression, Diane—at the behest of her new boyfriend, a bison named Guy (voiced by Lakeith Stanfield)—goes on antidepressants in Season 6, and the show’s casual-yet-crucial normalization of the reality of antidepressants has been, rightfully, repeatedly praised. At long last, Diane sits down to begin writing the book of personal essays she’s been wanting to write her entire life—but she can’t seem to do it. Nothing sounds good, sounds right. In the Season 6 episode “Good Damage,” which is centered around Diane and her simultaneous struggles with depression and with writing her memoir, Diane grows furious at herself for her inability to write the thing that would, in her mind, retroactively justify, make worthwhile, all those years she spent so deeply unhappy. We see her writing process depicted in frantically scribbled animation, messy and crude—except for one thing: a silly idea she can’t get out of her head about a kids’ book series revolving around a fictional young girl detective named Ivy Tran. It makes her happy to think about… which makes her irate with self-loathing. “I don’t want to write a middle-grade fiction detective series,” Diane snaps towards the end of the episode. She needs to write her book of essays above all else because “if I don’t, that means all the damage I got isn’t good damage, it’s just… damage. I have gotten nothing out of it, and all those years I was miserable was for nothing. I could’ve been happy this whole time, and written books about girl detectives, and been cheerful, and popular, and had good parents… What was it all for?” 

It’s incredible how Bojack so thoroughly nails something so hyper-specific and irrational about depression, especially considering most media that even delves into the territory in the first place rarely portrays an individual’s resistance to getting better as anything more than simple wallowing. But this mindset is not borne out of just “wallowing,” nor even just a fetishization of one’s own sadness; in Diane’s mind, this is the logical “solution” to her problem—the out she has given herself, the path to self-forgiveness. Everything can be forgiven if she can write this damn book, and, once she’s made meaning out of her suffering, then she can allow herself to be happy, or try to be. That’s the deal she’s struck. So what does she do if she can’t meet it? Diane spirals further and further, going off her antidepressants to devastating results, getting worse and worse until, eventually… she writes it. Not her book of essays, that is; her “middle-grade fiction detective series.” And she finds it in her to forgive herself anyways—to let herself move towards happiness without jumping through the impossible, arbitrary hoop she had convinced herself was the requirement. She accepts her “damage” as part of her, not something she needs to justify away, and begins to try to carve out happiness for herself in the present, even though she spent years vehemently insisting that wouldn’t be enough—because if she didn’t, if she remained in that purgatory, how many more years would she have lost to her own misery?

Representation of mental illness in media is immensely crucial; the feeling I got watching Bojack Horseman for the first time at 14 and seeing Diane’s post-Cordovia breakdown was nothing shy of revolutionary. But so, too, is representation of healing. It’s so easy to find yourself stuck, believing either that you won’t get better (like Bojack) or that you can’t allow yourself to, at least not yet (like Diane)—and as meaningful as it is to see characters suffering through those same feelings, it’s even more important to watch them unlearn them. It doesn’t feel good, and it might even make you angry, as Diane’s ending admittedly made me when the series finale first aired; as someone who saw a bit too much of herself in Diane, I felt almost betrayed that the character could let herself be happy without accomplishing that life goal, without first turning all the years she spent miserable into something meaningful. But that’s the thing: all of that is just an excuse to avoid getting better. It’s a hard truth to reckon with, and one I very much did not like being confronted by, but that’s what good media should do, is it not?

That’s what makes the inclusion of Diane into Bojack’s narrative so significant: few shows depict depression well. Fewer realistically, empathetically depict someone unable to leave it. Fewer still depict someone believably growing out of it. Between Diane and Bojack, the Netflix original does all three. Bojack’s story feels like a prolonged car crash: we desperately hope the car will brake in time, but deep down we know it won’t—in large part because that’s exactly the inevitability Bojack has resigned himself to. That’s what makes Diane so necessary: she struggles deeply with many of the same issues as the show’s protagonist, but she’s able to eventually do the work to get better, as winding and non-linear as that journey may be. Bojack is depressing at times, but it is thoroughly propelled by hope—the belief that people can change, can grow; they just need to believe it themselves, and then act on it (which is, of course, easier said than done). Bojack thinks he is doomed to be exactly like he is, but the show doesn’t. And in giving us Diane, a character who evolves from that mindset, we’re given an example of how to grow. It’s not pretty, easy, or glamorous. It’s small, subtle, and real.

The hope Bojack gives is incredibly rare, in that it’s one I find myself believing in—cynic that I am, most optimism in media tends to do little more than induce an eye-roll. But Bojack isn’t about life suddenly getting better, people suddenly being happier; it’s about learning to be okay with life not getting better, and letting yourself find small happinesses in it anyways until, one day, you realize you might just be okay. Nothing sums up the attitude of the series, nor the relationship between and dynamic of Diane and Bojack, more than the final dialogue of the series: Bojack sighs and lightly jabs, “Well, what are you gonna do? Life’s a bitch, then you die, right?” Diane furrows her brow and says: “Sometimes. Sometimes… life’s a bitch and then you keep living.” That’s the point of the show: not that life is a bitch—although it certainly is—but that life is a bitch, and you keep living it anyways. Diane continues after a beat: “But it’s a nice night, huh?” Bojack swallows, looks up at the sky. “Yeah. This is nice.”

Life’s a bitch, and it’s a nice night. Bojack and Diane might never see each other again after this, Diane might never write her book of essays, and Bojack’s image might never recover after the events of the final season, but it’s a nice night—life’s a bitch, and we might never be the people we want to be, but the stars are still out and the breeze is still cool. We grow and we change, rarely in the direction we hope to, and that can be devastating. But we’re still here, still living this bitch of a life, and sometimes, that will have to be enough. Diane Nguyen shows us that maybe it can be.

Casey Epstein-Gross is a New York based writer and critic whose work can be read in Paste, Observer, The A.V. Club, and other publications. She can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television, film, music, politics, or any one of her strongly held opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on Twitter or email her at [email protected].

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