I enjoy watching television with my wife. In fact, if we’re not together, I rarely, if ever, watch television at all. Aside from enjoying watching something with her, I also enjoy finding shows I think we’ll like watching together.

Typically, we enjoy female-fronted shows. Further, shows that are feminist in some way often rise to the top of our watch list. Loot, Parks and Recreation, The Law According to Lidia Poet, Bridgerton, Blue-Eyed Samurai, and Veep come to mind in that vein. We’ve also watched and enjoyed male-dominated shows—West Wing, The Bear, Severance, and The Office for example. But, mostly, we enjoy shows that center women.

Sometimes, I get suggestions from podcasts I listen to—and they’ve mostly been hits. But when the recommendation well is dry, I turn to “best TV” lists from various outlets I trust. What I am looking for usually is a female-fronted show that is on two or three of these lists. If so, there’s a good chance it’s going to be a banger.

That’s how I found out about Hacks a few weeks ago. (Yes, I know it’s been out for a few years; we don’t have Max/HBO.) Apple TV+ had a 2 seasons for $15 bundle, so we took a gamble on the show.

And, wow, were we hooked.We blazed through the available seasons in just a few weeks.

Hacks stars Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. Season one sees Einbinder’s character lose a comedy writing job and get thrust into a new opportunity with Smart’s character that neither of them wants. The season is about them making it work—or trying to. Season two picks up in the aftermath, and raises the career and relationship stakes for both characters. The third season, which we wrapped up tonight, aims higher in both ambition for the characters and rich story-telling for the viewer. The ending of season three was a pitch-perfect, extremely satisfying spot to land the narrative as season four looms on the horizon.

The show has a lot to say about aging, career decline, sexism, ambition, friendship, loneliness, desire, and work and family relationships. The tension exists mostly between Jean Smart’s character (Deborah Vance) and everyone else—a “will she be so awful or will she be kind” dynamic exists in almost every episode.

What pulls the show together is its heart. Comedies, I’ve found, are often the most meaningful; they often have the most to say about humanity. Think about The Office or Parks and Recreation—throughout the seasons, it wasn’t just all about laughs. There was real emotion, and a real range of emotions, laced throughout the show.

It’s no coincidence I keep mentioning those shows. Many of the producers involved in Hacks are from those shows: Michael Schur and Jen Statsky specifically. I don’t know how involved executive producers are, but Statsky also writes for the show, and the throughline from shows like The Good Place and Parks and Recreation is visible in Hacks. Subtle, of course—they’re very different shows—but centering narrative movement on characters and deriving forward (and backward) momentum from how the characters play off of each other is in the center of the Venn Diagram.

All this to say: if you like shows with heart, shows with wit, shows that center female stories, shows that are funny but that don’t flinch away from real emotion, Hacks is a show you should watch.