BoJack Horseman, which came to an end last week, is a Netflix cartoon about talking animals. So why has it come, over the course of its six seasons, to inspire such love and debate? One of the answers to this question lies in the way the script is shifting around what is allowed to be “profound”. Our lives, lived online and deeply connected at all times, have made us simultaneously more attuned to the significance of the everyday, while also distancing us from things that might appear hokey or overly sincere. We use the therapist’s office as a structure for setting up Twitter jokes about the ways we are lacking as people. We pepper our everyday speech with words like “dissociate” and “trauma”. All this self-awareness is painful, and funny. But I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t expect this subtle culture shift to manifest in the form of a talking cartoon horse.

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Somehow, the writers pull it off. Part of BoJack’s charm is to do with the fact that is tightly scripted – full of dynamic, hilarious and profound dialogue. But at the far limits of experience, language is inadequate. So it’s testament to the visual narrative and the careful pathos of the show that one of the best episodes is scriptless. Fish out of Water, a season 3 episode devoid of dialogue, follows BoJack through an underwater world, perfectly capturing the frustrations of being unable to navigate everyday spaces or communicate adequately with those around you. These frustrations are an inherent part of depression and addiction. It’s dreamlike in the way that day-to-day life can be dreamlike with certain mental illnesses: unable to be part of the world, we float away to some other place on the periphery.

Comically, the episode also accurately mimics the frustrations of a life where everything repeatedly goes wrong – BoJack’s attempts to make things right are thwarted at every turn. Connection is just out of reach. Without giving the ending away, the entire episode also serves as the build-up to one of the funniest, purest punchlines in the show’s history.

And that’s the success of the show overall. It rarely allows itself to linger for so long on painful existentialism that it can’t manage to do the simple job of making audiences laugh; whether that’s through the use of unexpected plot twists, animal puns, or the slapstick humour of watching a hammerhead shark trying to hammer a nail using his actual head.

The form lends itself to this sort of comedy, and it’s this use of juxtaposition that means the serious moments take us by surprise, and cut deep. “I feel like I was born with a leak,” BoJack says. “And any goodness I started with just slowly spilled out of me, and now it’s all gone. And I’ll never get it back in me. It’s too late. Life is a series of closing doors, isn’t it?” He says he doesn’t know how people get up every day and live, and yet every episode there he is doing just that. Making jokes, having sex, behaving in ways that he is expected to behave and then being punished for it. That’s the beauty of the sitcom set-up. Life is like that, isn’t it? A series of episodes of varying success.

There are still questions about how this show gained such an obsessively cultish following. Do we find solace in BoJack’s self-obsession because it excuses our own? Are we desperate to see the cartoonish aspire to be profound? Perhaps! Probably! Isn’t that what art is all about? When I make a pilgrimage to stand in a room full of paintings by Rothko and feel something, I do it with the self-importance that we tend to assign to “highbrow” pursuits. When I am watching the misadventures of a cartoon horse, and I am suddenly face to face with myself, that takes me by surprise, and I am moved deeply and without warning.

I know BoJack. I know where he’s from, who brought him up, what he has done, the thoughts that plague him. It’s all monumentally shitty. And yet, there’s no other way his life might have gone, because he sees himself as a person (or rather, a horse-man) without qualities. He expects less than nothing from himself, and when good things happen, he waits for the other shoe to drop. He expects that he will fuck up, and he uses his past to justify his future. And through the ups and downs of knowing BoJack, I have also come to know these things about myself.

• Eli Goldstone is the author of Strange Heart Beating