Hey! If you like @bojackhorseman and enjoyed "The View From Halfway Down," I'm going to be putting things I loved about being part of that episode on this thread for the rest of week. #bojackhorseman #emmy

It's certainly exciting being up for an #emmy , but honestly it was more thrilling for me to get to work on this show. During this anxious time of "will we or won't we," I'd rather turn my attention to my appreciation of my experience.

Okay. To start. Thing #1 - I believe the idea for this episode existed long before I was on the show (I started in season 4). @RaphaelBW was always noodling this dinner party idea with characters on the show who died.

When brainstorming on the show, Raphael would write story ideas on big notecards and tape them on the white board. The white board was divided into episode squares, and the cards would spend the season looking for an episode square home or (sadly) being thrown away.

The dinner party card idea was on the white board all season. Eventually it landed in square 615 and stayed there. When I was given that episode, and after it was written and we were wrapped, I took home the notecard.

And I was GONNA take a picture of the notecard just now but THEN I remembered I took it with me when I started a new job in New York WHEN A PANDEMIC hit and I quickly flew back to LA to work remotely AND I LEFT THE NOTECARD IN NY OFFICE WITH ALL MY OTHER OFFICE THINGS! UGGG.

Anyway. It was big and yellow and it just said "dinner party" in Raphael's handwriting and it's in New York on a bulletin board. The end.

Thing #2 - At the end of the very first outline for "The View From Halfway Down" I wrote: "BoJack grabs a phone. It has one of those long cords that stretch forever."

In my head I think I was imagining the phone we had in our kitchen growing up. How the long cord swirled together at the bottom after you hung it up. How it always got tangled, the spirals getting locked into other spirals, the weird parts where a spiral was flipped inside out.

How even with that long cord, whenever teenage me wanted to talk "privately" on the phone, I could only get as far as my back porch. And if I closed the porch door, it just pinched the cord so I could only be like maybe a foot away from the glass.

I think a lot of people had that phone growing up.

Anyway, I didn't go into that much detail about the phone when writing my drafts - it was just what was in my head. Sifting through, it looks like I wrote "the phone is on the wall" and, again, "it has one of those long cords that stretch forever" but that was it.

Maybe Raphael ended up writing in more phone details, I don't know.

But what I do know is when I finally got to see the completed episode, with all the amazing work of #lisahanawalt @amywinfrey @STUFFFEDanimals @ShadowMachine, and when it got to the part where BoJack finally grabs the phone...

I was like "Oh my god. That's my phone! That's it! That's my phone from my childhood!" Without ever describing it, there it was. The beige-yellow color, the rectangle base, the square buttons, the shape of the, um, ear/receiver part?, and the cord! That long cord!

That long cord that made you feel like you could walk so far... until you couldn't.

That was the phone BoJack had when he walked onto the porch to talk to Diane.

Again, I'm sure this was a very common phone.

But this just goes to show how impeccable @amywinfrey and her team were. They gave that episode a sense of immediate nostalgia, no detail was overlooked. It's truly incredible all the thought that went into the visuals.

I have no idea if that phone was also Lisa's or Amy's or Mike's or anyone's at Shadowmachine, and maybe I don't want to know.

(Wait, yes I do! Phone twins!)

In the end it was BoJack's phone from "The View From Halfway Down" - the phone he needed to get to, so he could call Diane.

Every time I see this picture online, (it's been used a lot to talk about this episode) I smile. There's BoJack on the phone with "one of those cords that stretch forever."

Thing #3 - Herb's long intro of BoJack, with the music revs in between each statement, was pitched by @nickadamsweb as a sort of homage/callback to how James Brown used to be introduced on stage.

Nick also wrote one of my favorite episodes in S6 - "Xerox of a Xerox" - which I think had one of the best act turns in the show, and which he seemed to write effortlessly.

Thing #4 - Because this episode was structured around a dinner party, Raphael gave me reading homework! For those of you who don't know me, I love reading homework! He gave me two plays to read, and I was pumped because, again, for those of you who don't know me, I love plays!

My degree is in theater, and in the theater world, the big dinner party scene is always the scene where characters, a la Real World cast members, "stop being polite and start getting real."

Some of my favorite dinner scenes in plays include:
The Act 1 finale in "You Can't Take It With You" by Hart and Kauffman (the 1938 film sadly doesn't have this scene and it's tragic).
The middle of Act 1 scene in "The Miracle Worker" by William Gibson (food fight!).

And basically the entirety of "August: Osage County" by Tracy Letts (The 2013 film? I liked it! "Eat your fish!")

In film, dinner party scenes are notoriously hard to shoot. You have a lot of characters to cover, a lot of angles, a lot of continuity, and you have to be able to seamlessly follow all the dialogue of (usually) overlapping conversations. The same challenges apply to animation.

@amywinfrey said that she assigned separate storyboard artists for each character in the "The View From Halfway Down" dinner party scene. In that scene, there are 8 characters.

One thing I love about how the dinner party turned out is there is a moment where the animation makes it feel like the you are also sitting at the table. There's even a plate set just for you. (Okay maybe its Sarah Lynn's plate but I like to pretend.)

Anyway, back to the plays! Raphael also loves plays, and has read many more than I have. He assigned me two plays I had never heard of before: "Three Tall Women" by Edward Albee and "Top Girls" by Caryl Churchill.

"Top Girls" has a dinner party scene with a group of dead historical women. "Three Tall Women" doesn't have a dinner scene, but, as the title suggests, it's about three tall women talking. Both plays were inventive in their use of overlapping, stream of consciousness dialogue.

It was great fun attempting to apply their styles to the episode, though I'll admit - similar to my experience with the internal monologue in Stupid Piece Of Shit - once the script got into Raphael's hands, he took all my loose, clunky dialogue and made it much much much better.

I didn't care too much for the Albee play (a great example of "Great play! Just not for me!") but I did enjoy "Top Girls" and after the show wrapped, I kept the script. And this momento is actually one that I have that I can show to you!

Thing #5 - Growing up, Scrubs was a VERY important show to me, (I was even given a pair of specialty made scrubs pants that said "Zach Braff Is One Of My Five" written on the leg as a birthday gift) so when I realized @zachbraff was going to be in the episode, I almost vomited.

I did not get a chance to meet Zach Braff because his record happened after the writers room had wrapped, but in a way, I'm glad because I think I would have made a damn fool of myself.

Anyway, my favorite part of Zach Braff being in the episode was when he was on his roller skates in shorts and you see the little hairs on his legs.

And if you think I'm lying about the scrubs, here they are. A little wear and tear because they're over 20 years old. (Thanks for making them, @MrsDalby_RHE!)

Thing #6 - The line "Oh, a plant. Dirt for inside. Goody." was pitched by @Mr_weatherbee (among many many other memorable things in this episode.) I know Beatrice says it, but I always hear Joanna pitching it when I watch that scene.

Joanna also wrote "Ruthie," a piece of writing that so wonderfully skates around comedy and tragedy. I remember reading it my first season on the show and thinking "I want to write like that!"

Thing #7 - Raphael has talked about this in interviews, but in the last season there was a day that we came in the room and there were letters taped on the white board. Just a handful of individual letters.

Raphael came in and explained that those letters were the remaining letters in the alphabet that have yet to be used as the first letter in a BoJack episode title. (Wow that sentence was hard to write, but you get what I am saying, right?)

It wasn't, like, a requirement or anything to use those letters. I looked at it as more of a side quest.

So, yeah, The View From Halfway Down got its title because, obviously, we still needed to use the letter V.

It's just fun as a writer to have prompts like that sometimes, a way to get creative within arbitrary confines. It's a helpful navigation brain trick, I think, for when you're maybe stuck. I don't think we'd have that episode title or the poem without the letter V.

Raphael titled the episode.

(Also, before you say anything, the word "the" doesn't count as the start of a title according to Raphael. It's not like we alphabetize things with "The.")

I'm not sure if we got to all the letters. I'm sure we did, but I've never checked. If someone knows, tell me!

Thing #8 - In the room, I was having trouble describing the window with the big moon behind the stage so writer @jonnysun grabbed a marker and quickly drew the perfect window with the big moon behind the stage BECAUSE JONNY CAN DO IT ALL.

Thing #9 - The other writers on the ep were @rrkaplan and @ShaunaCMcG. Rachel was wonderful in helping me break the story, and Shauna, who was writing 614, stopped working on her own script to send me notes. It made such a difference having so many women writers on this show.

Thing #10 - Final thing. And it's about the ending of the episode so SPOILER ALERT for those who haven't seen it. (Although if you haven't I'm sure you wouldn't be diving this far into this very self serving thread of mine)

There was a lot of discussion on how this episode would end. While we knew this episode wasn't the END end, and we knew the finale would be BoJack going to Princess Carolyn's wedding ("It Was Nice While It Lasted" is actually my favorite ep of season 6)...

...what we didn't know was when we would see BoJack wake up. Do we end this episode with the audience wondering? Or do we end with a "Tada! He's awake!"

An interesting conundrum considering this is a streaming show. If people had to wait an entire week in between episodes, the ending would have likely been a whole different discussion.

In my opinion, BoJack Horseman is ultimately a show about hope. So all I knew was that I personally wanted to leave this episode with at least some hope, even if there was just a sliver of it.

But when my final draft was turned in, the writers room was wrapping up, and the decision of when we see BoJack wake up was still TBD by Raphael. The final moment in the script at that point was just Diane's line: "Yeah. My day was good."

So when I left, I assumed that was when the episode ended.

Months later, Netflix sent me the final cut of the episode to watch before an interview we were doing with @vulture. I had just gotten to New York to start a new job. It was late on a week night. I was alone, in my sublet, knowing no one in a big city I knew nothing about.

This episode is hard one to watch by yourself. There I said it.

And of course I cried because I'm a crier. And of course I was amazed because it was amazing. But the part I remember most from the first watch was right after: "Yeah. My day was good" when I heard the heart monitor flatlining.

Okay. So the decision was made. I fucking lost it.

BUT THEN during the credits...

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Beep. Beep. Beep.

The flatline, it stopped. The heartbeat started again.

OH MY GOD.

In the end, Raphael put in a sliver of hope.

What a wonderful, smart moment. Nestled right there in the credits.

Anyway, I immediately called Raphael, and when he picked up, he seemed to know exactly why I was calling. I just said thank you a bunch and good job and hung up. And then I cried alone again in my, actually not my, apartment.

It's weird to think about that moment now. It was only back in January but with the year this has been it feels like it's from years ago.

We really had no idea what was in store for us in 2020, did we?

Anyway, those are just a few things I loved about being part of this episode. For those of you still reading, thank you for reading. I recognize that I am the most social media chatty of the BoJack writers. That's probably because everyone else on the show is much cooler than me.

But I think I'm also chatty because before writing on this show, I was a huge fan of the show. And I think doing these tweets is my attempt at splitting the difference.

BoJack is done now. It's over. "All good things..." and all that. And this Saturday is sort of the last hurrah of it all. Win or lose, we get one last celebration. In olden times when we could go outside, this Saturday would've been a chance to see the whole gang one last time.

But since we don't get to do that this year, I'm doing this. Just so the stories are told because they're fun to tell and the world right now is a giant garbage fire.

So thanks for letting me share. Fin. #BojackHorseman