Love is a broad, generic title for a television show. But it’s also an intriguing one, implying a vastness, an encompassing look at the human experience—or at least one huge, joyful, torturous, consuming part of the human experience. On first glance, Netflix’s new series, from husband-and-wife co-creators Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin, and Arfin’s former Girls boss, Judd Apatow, doesn’t quite live up to the expansiveness of its title. It initially appears to be yet another show about young(-ish) straight white folks flirting and dating, another look at millennial(-ish) Los Angeles (Echo Park to be exact), another gently chiding, aspirational satire of show business. In that way, Love bears some obvious similarities to Netflix’s other comedy series about romance and showbiz and city living, Master of None.

But as Love gradually chips away at that familiar paint, it uncovers some of the anguish and darkness conjured up, in darts and flashes, by that big, insisting title. Where Aziz Ansari, in Master of None, tends toward social satire and inquest, Arfin, Rust, and Apatow bore deeper into the psyche. Oddly but engagingly paced, Love, over the course of its 10-episode first season (which Netflix graciously made available in full for critics), becomes something surprising, a bleary and affecting study of a woman trying to come to terms with addiction, all the everyday pain and itch and restless jumble of it. By the end of the first season, Love has begun to reveal the series it maybe always should have been: hurting and truthful, about something far more complex and granular than simply “will they/won’t they.” Binge watching guaranteed also thanks to Gillian Jacobs (yes, the cool girl from Community).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym3LoSj9Xj8