Warning: contains spoilers for the final series of BoJack Horseman

BoJack Horseman has been proof that the best shows take time to grow, even in a streaming-dominated era where the sheer volume of content released from week to week has led to an obsession with the new. When it launched in 2014, Netflix was still relatively new to the original programming game, and its initial successes – House of Cards, Orange is the New Black – were the kind of dense, addictive dramas familiar from prestige cable channels like HBO (Mad Men, Girls) or AMC (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead). On paper, a crudely illustrated cartoon set in Hollywood about an alcoholic, depressed horse actor (voiced by Will Arnett), with a supporting cast of anthropomorphic animals, however, seemed like something thrown together in the eleventh hour of a brainstorm.

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But over time, it has grown in confidence and scope, while getting the knives out, particularly, for Hollywood – known in the show as ‘Hollywoo’ – and the broken systems supporting the world of celebrity. Come its second season, BoJack Horseman was hailed as ambitious and audacious – and since then its creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg has used it to delve into hot-button subjects from gun legislation to women’s reproductive rights and dementia.

One of the show’s most damning storylines remains season two’s Hank After Dark, in which journalist Diane Nguyen (Allison Brie) attempted to expose beloved talk show host Hank Hippopopalous for his alleged abusive behaviour. Not only was it a powerful story about a fictional man’s abuse of power, but Diane’s monologue to Hank saw her reel off a list of men who have faced real allegations of harassment or abuse, too; Christian Slater, Bill Murray, Woody Allen. It was a scathing shot fired not at a hippo in an imagined world, but at all the real men protected by an industry that stands to lose out financially were alleged abusers really held to account.