But perhaps only “BoJack Horseman” feels as if it’s been preparing for this moment for the whole life of the show. Its fifth season sketches in several shades of Hollywood abuse. Vance Waggoner, a Mel Gibson type, keeps offending new groups — Jews, women, Swedes — and each time is showered with the industry’s forgiveness despite demonstrating zero personal growth. Flip McVicker, the creator of a tortured noir crime show within the show, flexes his power over actors by forcing them to perform naked. A literal sex robot becomes the head of a television network. Then there’s BoJack, who adds to his long list of crimes against women by choking his co-star girlfriend while high on pills this season.

BoJack ranks among television’s new class of sub-anti-heroes, protagonists so bad that we don’t even root for them, exactly. We know that the more BoJack succeeds in Hollywood, the more monstrous he becomes. Mostly, we want him to stop. That all makes him a particularly interesting figure right now, as the public conversation around harassment moves tentatively toward what to do with men accused of misconduct. While “Charmed” can wring plenty of satisfaction out of depicting sexual harassers as literal demons and suggesting that the solution to their behavior lies in a spell book, “BoJack” grapples with the reality that harassers are people.

Or at least, horse-people. BoJack is a fictional cartoon horse, and that certainly helps. The real disgraced men who have tried to inch back into public life — Louis C.K. taking the stage at the Comedy Cellar and the radio hosts John Hockenberry and Jian Ghomeshi writing tortured personal essays in fancy literary magazines — have been met with well-earned disdain. These men have gotten themselves into trouble, and they think they can write and joke and perform themselves out of the mess. But they don’t seem to have done the work to earn our attention back. Part of the problem is that so many of them remain obscured in the fog of denial.

In their essays, Mr. Hockenberry and Mr. Ghomeshi downplay their culpability and deny the most serious accusations against them. For Mr. Hockenberry, unwanted touching and harassment are recast as “pathetically confessed romantic feelings.” For Mr. Ghomeshi, thoroughly reported claims of sexual assault and harassment from more than 20 women he worked with and dated are called “accusations circulated online.” (Though Mr. Ghomeshi was acquitted of several sexual assault charges in court, and settled a further assault claim, there are many more outstanding accusations.)

Instead they plead to lesser charges: I’m sorry for being a bad boyfriend; I’m sorry romance is so confusing. We can’t move on to the redemption stage of their narratives when we can’t even agree on the premise.