When BoJack Horseman’s fourth season went to air, a year ago last month, I wrote one of the internet’s few dissenting opinions. My problems with the season, outlined in these pages at the time, were in reality rather minor, and probably only seemed as harsh as they did on the grounds that everyone else seemed to think that the season was a masterpiece. In some ways, it was, for all the reasons that keep BoJack Horseman one of the best and most consistent shows on television. It has one of the greatest voice casts ever assembled for a animated series—its guest actors aren’t slouches, either, from Keith Olbermann as a whale who hosts a show on MSNBSea to Jessica Biel as a deeply unhinged version of herself—and you could hang almost every frame of its world-class animation on your wall. The show is always funny, always sad, always worth its weight in gold.

But I argued that the fourth season was also ‘spinning its wheels’.