This fourth season is no different, as we learn more about the inner lives, desires, hopes, fears and dreams of characters we have grown to know and love. In one of many moving storylines this season, Princess Carolyn goes to the jewelry store to get the clasp to her favorite necklace fixed. She tells the jeweler that the necklace was a family heirloom from the “old country” but when she comes to pick it up, the jeweler informs her that the piece is, in reality, worthless: it is just another piece of costume jewelry.

“Somebody just told you a story,” the jeweler says, “I’m sorry.”

In the next scene, we see a distraught Princess Carolyn cry privately in her car. Throughout the series, Princess Carolyn is portrayed as a fierce go-getter, someone who is not only able to lift herself up, but who dedicates a tremendous amount of her life to lifting up others: from convincing actors to pursue a compelling script, to talking BoJack down from one of his ridiculous drunken binges. In season one, we watched Princess Carolyn give herself a similar kind of pep talk, urging herself to not let her emotions get the best of her and be little more than a machine. In season four, we see a brokenhearted, but perhaps wiser, Princess Carolyn come to terms with her own disappointment.

“BoJack Horseman” has always been a show that is self-aware about its lineage: a season three poster features a close-up of BoJack looking squarely into the camera with the words “Soprano, Draper, Underwood, Horseman” over his head. But in addition to these antihero influences, the series is also a clear articulation of Joan Didion’s vision of California: from her obsession with looking at the hopes and follies of the American Dream to the quintessentially American fantasy of escape and starting over that renders California both alluring and devastating. Didion famously opens her book The White Album with the line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and season four of “BoJack” unpacks what it means when our fantasies don’t measure up with our very real experiences.