Insecure

In Season 5, “Insecure” leans into its legacy for awkward small talk in place of punch lines and tensions that roil between the lines of every text message. Its charismatic characters progress, inch by inch, in pursuit of grand romantic love and career clout while taking for granted what’s already aspirational about their lives: to be entrenched with people who you know so well. And to be doing it all in Lotusland.

A fresh, sharp-edged comedy that swerves past nearly every cliché.

In other words: they’re actual, believable people. It’s easy to root for them even as it hurts to watch them stumble--a combination that makes Insecure an immediate force to be reckoned with.

Insecure is less inherently dramatic than some of the other Comedies In Theory, which makes the infrequency of laugh-out-loud moments a bigger issue than on, say, Casual, but Rae is a really engaging writer and performer, and the series is charming and compulsively watchable.

Insecure is alive and engaged in the time after Tinder was new and fun, when you realize that bad luck in love and dreaded dry spells are often caused from within and politics are unbearably personal. It also happens to be a show that most fans of Living Single or Laverne & Shirley would probably love.

Insecure is brazenly confident in its comic, profane authenticity. [3-9 Oct 2016, p.23]

Seems less a sitcom than a character study inflected by melancholy humor and hip-hop idioms. It sometimes tries a bit too hard to flash its street credentials (the episodes all have titles like "Messy as Fuck" and "Thirsty as Fuck"), but that's more than compensated for by its obdurate refusal to bill itself as the master narrative of black women. It's content to be the piquant story of two confused friends trying to navigate the uncertainties of the young-adult world.

It may not be the most hilarious show on television (although it does have quite a few laugh-out-loud moments), but Issa Rae is so lovably awkward and the whole series is just compulsively watchable.