This post contains spoilers for BoJack Horseman Season 4.
Any journalist can probably relate to Diane Nguyen’s plea for recognition in the tenth episode of BoJack Horseman’s fourth season. After publishing a bombshell interview that tanked an unqualified gubernatorial candidate’s campaign, she’s surrounded by people asking, “Wow, who’d have thunk that such a small trivial detail could be the thing to take Biel down?”
“I knew!” Diane exclaims. “I put the avocado thing in the story on purpose because I knew that people wouldn’t like it, so—just for the record—I thunk it. Even though it totally doesn’t matter. I don’t need the credit. But it kinda does matter, because if I didn’t do that, it wouldn’t have happened. So, it’s because of me.”
The moment plays for laughs, and Diane nearly breaks the fourth wall leading up to it. But it’s also the (lighthearted) climax of Diane’s journalistic arc in a season jam-packed with weighty character arcs. Diane’s interview with the candidate, Jessica Biel, may be ethically unsound, given that Biel is the ex-wife of Diane’s husband (himself a former gubernatorial candidate) and that the piece was assigned specifically to focus on the candidate positively. None of that matters because Diane works for “Girl Croosh,” a rich person’s clickbait machine (it spoofs so many websites, and not just ones targeting a female demographic, that I’ve lost count). For Diane, the story isn’t ideal, but it’s her assignment.
In a show propelled by portrayals of volatile Hollywood personalities and power spheres, Diane’s often been professionally adrift. She’s either battling BoJack on the composition of his autobiography or she’s gallivanting around the world with Sebastian St. Clair on pseudo-humanitarian missions.
Through it all, Diane’s relationships suffer, but so does her morale and self-worth. It’s why she spent a while running social media for C-list celebrities. It’s why she took a less-than-ideal job at a content farm like Girl Croosh. It’s why she carried a gun. It’s one of the reasons she and Mr. Peanutbutter have such aggressive power-driven sex this season. It’s why she kinda blew that weird “Channing Tatum’s illegitimate child” story in the Todd episode — fortunately, as it turns out. Diane, we know, is better than all of this. BoJack spells out for her in the season three finale: “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re too good to be writing Instagram captions.”
That’s why Diane’s win is so important. If you watch the interview with Biel, set in a hoity-toity restaurant, her approach—at least at first—is pretty straightforward. She didn’t omit relevant, crucial details in her framing of the character of an airhead celebrity political candidate. She didn’t allow herself to be charmed by Biel’s personality, or lose her cool when Biel brought up her husband. She didn’t ask “gotcha” questions or try to catch Biel in a lie. Everything is on the record. Biel even tells her the words: “You can keep writing whatever you want about me.” Minutes later, Diane watches Biel flip out on a server over the plating of an avocado. If you’re in Diane’s shoes, how do you not print that? At that point, there’s no art left to cranking out that simple interview for the fickle internet wastelands. There is only practiced method and news judgment, and that clearly went into Diane’s calculus before publishing. That’s a good thing, for both Diane and California’s constituents.
The fourth season of BoJack Horseman gets a lot right, from its treatment of addiction and depression to its asexual representation, but politics and the role media plays in them is new territory for the series. It’s hard not to watch it with the 2016 campaign still fresh in the brain, and you need only read the work of John Herrman to understand just how grim the prognosis looks for the media as an industry. But within that morass, Diane’s a tiny beam of clarity, still proven to be better than everyone around her. Hopefully next season she gets a better job.
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