Back in the 90s, BoJack Horseman—a man with the head of a horse, or a horse with the body of a man; don’t ask, just go with it—was in a very famous TV show. It was called Horsin’ Around, and it centered on a gaggle of human orphans being raised by a clueless but loving equine father figure with a Bill Cosby sweater and a luscious mane worthy of a young John Stamos.

Nowadays, as depicted on Netflix’s celebrated, pun-loving sadcom of the same name, BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) is a depressed has-been doing his best to stay relevant in the fickle world of Hollywood—or Hollywoo, as it’s called on the show. (Again: just go with it.) Which is why audiences may not be surprised when partway through the series’s third season—live on Netflix as of midnight Friday—BoJack hears about a new opportunity. (Minor spoilers for Season 3 follow.) It's a sequel to Horsin’ Around being shopped by another one of the sitcom’s washed-up stars, Bradley Hitler-Smith (Adam Conover). In Ethan Around, as Bradley explains to BoJack, “Ethan is the dad, and he’s raising three little horses.”

A gender-swapped—er, species-swapped—version of the sitcom’s original premise, focused on one of its former child stars? That hypothetical series sounds an awful lot like Fuller House, an actual 90s sitcom revival that stars the all-grown-up cast of Full House—and shares a streaming home with BoJack. Ask BoJack creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg about the similarities, though, and he’ll try at first to deflect the question—albeit in a good-natured tone that indicates he knows he’s not telling the hoof, the whole hoof, and nothing but the hoof.

“I can’t—I don’t—you know, look, a show exists, and then it is popular and beloved, and it comes back in a new iteration,” he explained during a recent phone conversation with Vanity Fair, when asked about Ethan Around’s Fuller House connection. “I mean, that happens all the time. You might as well say it’s a parody of Star Trek, right? It’s basically the same.”

Push a little further, though, and Bob-Waksberg will get back on the horse.

Netflix, he says, was “cool with” his show poking fun at its network-mate, perhaps because the network understood that BoJack’s goal wasn’t necessarily “just talking shit about Fuller House.” (It probably helps that Fuller House was also a smashing success that drew as many as 14.4 million viewers in its first 35 days of release, critics and reviews be damned.) Instead, Bob-Waksberg says, because nostalgic sitcom revivals like these have become increasingly common, “it would be weird to ignore it in the BoJack Horseman universe.” He likened the situation to Larry David’s uncanny resemblance to Bernie Sanders—once people started noticing it, it would have felt strange for Saturday Night Live not to bring David on to spoof the presidential candidate.

And as parodies go, BoJack’s take on Fuller House is a lot gentler than you might expect. There’s real pathos in Bradley’s desire to relive his glory days: “For the last 20 years, I’ve been telling people I didn’t need the trappings of fame. That I was better off, happy with my little B-plus life and my little B-plus hardware store, and little B-plus Olympia, Washington,” he tells BoJack. “But it’s a lie. I miss the warmth of the spotlight on my face, the thrill of telling a joke and feeling it land. . . . I’m ready to come home.”

Perhaps Fuller House stars Candace Cameron-Bure, Andrea Barber, and Jodie Sweetin would actually feel a sort of kinship with him—if they or their co-workers ever checked out BoJack. Which Bob-Waksberg is pretty sure they haven’t, even though he’s seen every episode of Fuller House himself. (He calls the show “a blast.”)

“You know, in the first episode, they do this gag where Stephanie comes back from England and she has a British accent,” he said. “Which is very similar to a gag we did on Bojack . . . which suggests to me that the powers that be at Fuller House have not seen Bojack. So no,” he continued, laughing, “I don’t presume that any of them have the time or interest to watch BoJack. Nor do I blame them.”