Whatever happens in the last eight episodes, Bojack Horseman is the comedy of the decade

Tomorrow morning will be January 31st, the day Netflix releases the last eight episodes of Bojack Horseman. I'll probably leave work early to come home and drink it all in, possibly while actually drinking. Whatever those eight episodes contain, it's already likely the best comedy I've ever seen.

Bojack Horseman is a show about sadness. More specifically, about sadness with an ill-defined cause. It's about sadness making you hurt the people around you, making you even sadder.

If Bojack Horseman, about to finish its run on Netflix tomorrow after six too-short seasons, is a great show, it's because it spoke to the age it was made in as few stories have. The animated show about a half-man, half-horse, has-been TV star who suddenly becomes a star again but cannot get out of his own way and stop "fetishizing his own sadness" resonated because the culture viewing it is full of an alarming number of people who also can't stop feeling sad. In the midst of plenty, we're full of misery.

What I've loved about this show is what it isn't. It isn't anything you can easily condense into a simple message. It's not about Bojack having some lovable core deep down inside.

It's not about Bojack being flawed but relatable, someone who can make us feel less bad about ourselves. Season Five pretty much destroyed that as a viable reading of the show.

Bojack is not really admirable. He's barely redeemable. But I don't think it's true, either, as one writer put it, that the point of the show is simply to "not be like Bojack." He's not just a cautionary tale. We like Bojack. We forgive Bojack. Eventually. Even when he nearly has sex with a near-minor, or when he contributes to the death of a woman who looks up to him like a father, or when he is drugged out and attacks his co-star/lover. The reason he's able to get away with things is because people naturally like him. Which Bojack knows, feels he doesn't deserve, and feels terrible about when he doesn't really face the comeuppance he knows he deserves.

The last episode in October left us wondering if that comeuppance is about to finally come. When it does, how Bojack reacts will give us all the final word on what this series was aiming at. But I think it's already been written into the show. There's not going to be a single, epiphanic moment when Bojack figures it out. He's had many small epiphanies, and he's maybe improved a bit with some of them. During the rehab arc, he really seemed to be on a good path. Will the revelation of secrets derail him?

I think it might, but the point of the series seems to be that there's no real secret to anything. You have to do the work and keep doing it.

The last eight episodes will reveal whether Bojack, having suffered a setback, will be able to commit to continuing to do the work.

The show doesn't discount modern psychiatric remedies for sadness. Diane's decision to take anti-depressants seems to be the right one, in spite of her weight gain. But it also reminds us that anti-depressants alone won't do it.

It's easy to say that we're all unhappy because of something unprecedented in our society today. There is plenty of that, to be sure. Our constant connectivity, lack of mental down time, and social media constantly ratcheting up our over-reactions all hurt our mental health. But there's another unprecedented factor in our society, which is our unprecedented lack of a sense of responsibility. It's easy for us to complain about the political system not caring about people, but it's harder to ask ourselves if we do. It's easy to blame distractions in society for our sense of malaise, but it's harder to look at our own decisions and how they affect our well-being.

The show is hyper-modern, but also quite old-fashioned. It's full of irony, but its irony is never cynical. It's almost preachy, in a charming, funny, nihilistic way. I've never seen anything like it, and even though I resisted watching it until three seasons had passed, now that I've watched it, I don't know what I'll do without it.