I’ve been fascinated by the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, community in Israel for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a Jerusalem neighborhood a short car ride away from their most insular enclave, in Mea Shearim, and on trips that required passing through that part of town—to the dentist, to a friend’s father’s house—I used to watch their large families with envy: packs of children running side by side on cobbled streets, the girls in velvety dresses that appeared to have been cut from a single fabric, in what struck me then as an elaborate show of sisterhood.

Over the years, that envy morphed into something I can only call pity. I observed not the Haredi children but their older sisters and harried young mothers, often hidden behind a two-seat stroller. Under the unsparing Israeli sun, they wore scrimlike tights, wool sweaters, and heavy-looking wigs. They looked exhausted. The film “Kadosh,” from 1999, by the (nonreligious) Israeli director Amos Gitai, seemed to reaffirm my bias: telling the story of two Haredi sisters—one whose husband is advised to leave her because they can’t conceive and the other forced into a loveless marriage—the film portrayed Haredi women as enslaved, yearning to break free. Reared on certain freedoms, I found it impossible to view non-freedom with anything less than casual judgment. A wish for validation creeps in, too. The stranger, the more stifling, the world depicted, the more the contours of ours no longer chafe.

A voyeuristic urge takes over when it comes to isolated, self-sufficient societies. We purport to want to learn about parallel ways of living when, really, a stronger impulse is to figure out how different they are from our own. In 2007, like many Israelis, I was glued to a hit television series, “A Touch Away,” about an ultra-Orthodox teen-age girl in the Haredi city of Bnei Brak who falls in love with a secular Russian émigré. I thought I was getting an authentic glimpse of how “they”—the Haredim—lived, but what I was really watching, I’ve since realized, was an elevated soap opera whose implicit message was that romantic love can only be attained by overcoming religious strictures.

The degree to which superficiality and conjecture had informed my view of an entire community hadn’t occurred to me. Not, that is, until I watched “Shtisel,” an Israeli series now streaming on Netflix, about four generations of an ultra-Orthodox family living in Jerusalem. The show, which was created by two men with intimate knowledge of the Haredi community, mines drama from the restrictions of ultra-Orthodox life but doesn’t suggest that its central characters want or need to escape. It’s not, like most other depictions of the Haredim, about the desire to leave the confines of their society but rather about the ordinary pains and joys of living within it. As one of the show’s creators, Yehonatan Indursky, told me, “This outlook that Haredim live in a kind of ghetto and are just waiting for the day they can escape—it’s an occupation fantasy for secular people.”

The series, which first aired in Israel on the satellite-broadcasting channel Yes, in 2013, introduces us to the Shtisel family exactly a year after the matriarch of the family has died. The son, Akiva, is a dreamy alter, or “aging bachelor,” of twenty-four, who draws in secret. He takes a job as a substitute teacher at a school where his father teaches and falls in love with Elisheva, an older, widowed mother of one of his students. Shulem, the father, is a man of creature comforts who always seems to be eating. When the series opens, he transfers his mother to a nursing home where, for the first time in her life, she owns a television. The stalest reality show becomes, in her telling, a Talmudic feat: “There is a tribunal of scholars who teaches them how to sing!” she tells Shulem breathlessly. Akiva’s sister Giti is married to a kosher butcher who goes rogue in Argentina, leaving her to care for their five children alone. The couple’s eldest daughter is Ruchami, a beautifully drawn teen-age bibliophile who, at night, reads to her brothers from what she calls “Hannah Karenina.”

“Shtisel” is generous, lighthearted, and nostalgic—even when the origins of its nostalgia remain elusive. It is also a little old-fashioned, not only because of its subject matter but because of its situational structure. Things happen and cease to happen to the characters within a single episode: an illness, a robbery. It’s drama dressed as a sitcom. The show’s center of gravity is the father-son relationship between Shulem and Akiva, who are usually seen sitting around their cramped kitchen table, with its waxy tablecloth, eating sliced vegetables in their shirtsleeves and prayer shawls. In one such episode, they discuss Akiva’s unrequited love for Elisheva. Shulem refers to her as “the Widow Rothstein,” and “the one from the bank.” (She works as a teller.) Akiva had called off an arranged engagement to another woman, and Shulem worries that this has rendered his son “second rate.” Yet it’s because he suspects that Akiva may have already damaged his marriage prospects that Shulem now comes around to his son’s pursuit of Elisheva. What’s to lose?, Shulem thinks. He is practical, unsentimental. He advises his son to be steady and confident, “like the sun,” and to force Elisheva to “revolve” around him. But Akiva berates him: “Times are changing, Aba.” (“The Jew stays the same, and so does the sun,” Shulem retorts.)

What Akiva thinks is changing is never made clear. It can’t be much, considering that the show makes marriage between cousins, and an engagement between two sixteen-year-olds, look quotidian, even romantic. And yet, for twelve episodes a season, your mores are imbued with those onscreen. You find yourself cheering on consanguinity, mazal-tov-ing the teenagers. “Shtisel” casts that kind of spell. This is, in large part, a credit to its creators’ nonjudgmental touch, and the result of several powerfully understated performances, most notably by Ayelet Zurer, in the role of Elisheva, and Neta Riskin, as Giti—two fiery, intelligent women who have been let down by life. “Shtisel” may be fuelled by Akiva and Shulem, but it’s the women who turn up the heat. “You don’t really see me,” Elisheva tells Akiva at one point. “I don’t have the energy to start over.” “Start what?” he asks. “Everything,” she says. “I don’t have the energy for love, a wedding, a home, furniture, more family, more children, more life.”

Squint a little, and Elisheva could be a character out of Jane Austen—an Anne Elliot or an Elinor Dashwood. This is one of the pleasures of watching the show, and a reminder of why contemporary takes on marriage plots are hard to pull off: the stakes never seem reliably high when all you have to do is swipe right. In their Haredi neighborhood of Geula, however, glances matter, as does the peril of slipping in the social order and crashing out of a worthy match.

In “Shtisel” ’s second season, we are introduced to Nuchem, Shulem’s brother, who arrives from Belgium with his daughter to find her a husband.

“Don’t you have enough young men in Antwerp?” Shulem asks him.