Spoilers ahead for Season 1 of Gypsy. Netflix's Gypsy tells a slow and winding story, dipping its toes into a dark, intriguing mystery without ever showing its cards. It centers around Jean Holloway (Naomi Watts), a Manhattan therapist who splits her time between Connecticut suburbia and stalking patients. As a precaution, she goes by an alias when interacting with the people in her clients' lives, but her double identity seems so elaborate that it almost feels real. So who is Diane Hart on Gypsy? Is she an actual person, or just a character Jean dreamt up for her illicit escapades?
By the end of the show's first season, it's still unclear. Diane is a divorced freelance journalist. She was educated at Stanford, has an apartment on the Upper West Side, and drinks Bulleit Bourbon whiskey. Her future plans are unknown. Or at least, those are the facts that Jean recites to remind herself who Diane is. Jean, on the other hand, is a married mom who lives in Darien, Connecticut. She loves her husband, and throws backyard birthday parties for her gender non-conforming daughter; Diane goes to dive bar concerts, smokes weed, and hooks up with her barista girlfriend in the back of a coffee shop.
It's possible that Jean based Diane on someone else, as there seems to at least be articles by someone with that name floating around the internet. But more than likely, it's a persona Jean hand-crafted — an alternate fantasy for who she could have been had she led a different life.
Whoever Diane is, however she came about, it's clear Jean is intimately familiar with her, whether because she knew the real-life person or because she's a product of her own design. And she flips between the two so effortlessly that by the end of Gypsy, it's impossible to tell which woman she really is.
