‘BoJack Horseman’s Creator Says This Is His Biggest Regret About the Show
If BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg could go back in time, “Hollywoo’s” most beloved author would’ve been much more true-to-life.
The showrunner recently admitted that one of his “bigger mistakes” while crafting the animated series was neglecting to hire Vietnamese-American writers to help fully flesh out Diane Nguyen.
“The real complaint about Diane from Vietnamese-American viewers was that she didn’t feel authentically Vietnamese,” Bob-Waksberg told Slate of the backlash to the Alison Brie-voiced character and her family.
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Both Bob-Waksberg and Brie have expressed regrets about letting a white woman voice a Vietnamese-American character, with the actress previously stating that the show “missed a great opportunity to represent the Vietnamese-American community accurately and respectfully.”
But to Bob-Waksberg, the issues with Diane ran deeper than just poor casting choices, and reflected a lack of inclusion in the show’s writers’ room. “That wasn’t because of Alison’s performance. It was about the way the character was crafted,” he explained. “Because she was a white woman, that made me more skittish about leaning into some of the Vietnamese stories that we might’ve told otherwise.”
This isn’t the first time Bob-Waksberg has expressed remorse over the show’s notoriously whitewashed cast and writers’ room. “Even in the small ways we wrote to Diane’s experience as a woman of color, or more specifically an Asian woman, we rarely got specific enough to think about what it meant to be SPECIFICALLY VIETNAMESE-AMERICAN,” he recalled in a now-deleted Twitter thread. “That was a huge (racist!) error on my part.”
Considering that many actors on his latest series, Long Story Short, which centers on Jewish identity, are actually Jewish (a complex debate that has largely divided Jewish communities), it appears he’s taken this lesson to heart.
