On “The End of the F***ing World,” intimacy doesn’t need to be healthy to be genuine. Illustration by Adrian Tomine

The first person we meet on “The End of the F***ing World,” on Netflix, is James, a dour, pie-faced seventeen-year-old who is “pretty sure” he’s a psychopath. At nine, James tells us in voice-over, he stuck his hand into a tub of boiling oil, just to feel something. At fifteen, he brought his neighbor’s cat into the woods. We watch him commit the latest in a series of murders of small animals, whose corpses are arrayed against a bare background, a queasy vision of his inner life. The cat “probably had a name,” James tells us.

That intro seems to promise a familiar modern television genre: the comedy so cruel that it doubles as an endurance test. Instead, “The End of the F***ing World”—which is written by Charlie Covell, adapted from Charles Forsman’s graphic novel, and directed by Jonathan Entwistle and Lucy Tcherniak—evolves into something much rarer, a convincing teen-age romance. At once a joyful watch and a morally destabilizing one, it bears some relationship to “Fleabag,” another dark British comedy driven by the narration of a deeply screwed-up individual, plotted so that its more compassionate themes come as a pleasant shock. Luckily, in an age of TV overkill, the show doesn’t take long to get there: it is only eight episodes long; each is twenty minutes.

James is played by Alex Lawther, who had the leading role in “Shut Up and Dance,” one of the most disturbing episodes of “Black Mirror,” Charlie Brooker’s digital dystopia. In that episode—this is a major spoiler, and there will be a few more minor ones, so here’s your chance to jump ship—Lawther played another teen-ager, a boy targeted by an Anonymous-esque blackmail ring for having viewed child pornography. In the grand tradition of emasculated actors like Jeremy Davies and Crispin Glover, Lawther played the role in a full-body cringe, his cheeks pink with shame, like a scarecrow on fire. By the final sequence, the show had steered the viewer into a set of challenging insights: that a victimizer might be a victim, too, and worthy of pity; that a teen-ager can have the potential for evil and still lack the moral capacity of an adult; and that bad acts and brave ones can coexist without blotting each other out.

In “The End of the F***ing World,” Lawther plays a similarly cringing, quaking junior predator, but he is less alone in the world. James’s partner in crime is Alyssa, a classmate, portrayed by Jessica Barden. A mouthy fuckup from a bad family, Alyssa is drawn to James right away: he’s such an affectless blank slate that he seems perfect for an angry girl to scribble on. He also appears to be playing hard to get. But James is objectifying her in a far more sinister way: she’s a potential murder victim larger than a cat. Their early interactions consist of grotesque but hilarious games of erotic give-and-take, as she attacks and he mostly retreats, slipping his knife beneath a decorative pillow. It’s a slasher-flick variation on the sex lives of ordinary teens, during a stage when people often take risks because they don’t know what they want, other than for something major to happen.

Before long, James and Alyssa run off together. And then, quickly, the plot begins to kink. The story doesn’t get any less dark—we’re promised murder and we get it, along with cops, stickups, and the kind of illegal adventures that Alyssa, who sees the pair as society-defying rebels, keeps comparing with American movies—but what unfolds is also much more tender than, say, “Natural Born Killers.” The cartoonish po-mo aesthetics—a blood stain that spreads into the shape of a heart, as Brenda Lee sings “I’m Sorry”—let us keep a safe distance from painful material. But the series isn’t fetishistic about the characters. They imagine themselves the way that so many troubled young people do: as both absolute originals and total pieces of shit. Neither is a reliable narrator, although both are sincere. They’re not final drafts.

The show deserves extra credit for not falling into a few TV traps. It doesn’t score lazy porno kicks off teen-age couplings, in the tradition of certain shows I could name that are set in Riverdale. It doesn’t make our heroes “Dawson’s Creek”-y sophisticates. And, though it’s certainly a story about an antihero, Alyssa is as complex a character as James is. She’s a brat and a canny rebel, a poser and a naïf, a resister to a world that keeps trying to reduce her to jailbait prey. She’s more than a catalyst for a boy, although she’s that, too. There’s a beautiful moment early on, in a diner, when Alyssa is rude to a waitress for no good reason, ordering a “banana shit.” As matters escalate, a tiny smile cracks James’s face: his grim can’t withstand her gonzo.

Not every thread is perfect: a tangent about lesbian cops seems to be missing a step. But the show is paced so well that it doesn’t matter, and, finally, it has something in common with a movie like “Muriel’s Wedding,” a story in which grotesque characters, living in an even uglier world, find ways of liberating themselves without becoming normal. Intimacy doesn’t need to be healthy to be genuine.

The surreal but accurate conceit of “Big Mouth,” an animated comedy co-created by Nick Kroll, is that the central tween characters are being egged on by a hormone monster, a kind of deranged hype man invisible to the world. Andrew (voiced by John Mulaney) is a neurotic rule follower, but his hormone monster is a fetish-happy freak who moans things like “Fallopian! What a sav-v-vory word.” Jessi (Jessi Klein) is a smart and grounded girl, but her hormone monster is an ultra-confident, bubble-bath-scented broad (played with hilarious brass by Maya Rudolph) who demands that Jessi no longer call her mother Mom: “From now on, you call her Shannon!” Nick’s monster is, literally, the ghost of Duke Ellington.

The through-line of “Big Mouth,” also on Netflix, is puberty in its grottiest manifestations: zits, boners, blood, hair, mood swings, and compulsive masturbation. Initially, this makes it gross enough to be a deal-breaker for many viewers. In the pilot alone, there’s a sleepover jack-off; an accidental ejaculation during a slow dance; a fantasy sequence in which basketball players turn into graphically drawn penises; and another fantasy sequence, in which some sperm, swimming in a toilet, dreamily remark, “Not to sound gay, but I miss the balls.”

And yet, as with “End of the F***ing World,” that initial impression—that it’s guy stuff, test-your-limit, un-P.C. sex humor—is misleading. By Episode 2, it’s as much about the girls as about the boys. By Episode 7, the plots extend past the characters to their families, in a way that resembles a more manic “Freaks and Geeks.” There’s a smart thread in which Andrew wonders if he’s gay; another about the geeky Missy (Jenny Slate)’s obsession with pulp romance; and we learn so much about the obnoxiously aggro Jay (a terrific Jason Mantzoukas) that he makes sense as more than a perverted bully. There’s a timely plot about sexual coercion, involving the familiar push-her-head-down move. The show stays disgusting, but it’s also witty, sweet, and affecting. There’s a case to be made for a little rough honesty about a period of life more often portrayed with sanitized “Wonder Years” nostalgia.

In one of the best early episodes, Jessi becomes a woman, inconveniently, during a field trip to the Statue of Liberty. As she sits, panicked, in the bathroom, the statue suddenly grips her in its enormous green hand and welcomes her to “the covenant of mahn-stroo-ah-tion.” “Being a woman is meesery,” Liberty drawls, in an insane French accent, puffing on a cigarette. “Nothing but blood and unwanted bahbies from terrible lahvers.” In desperation, Jessi is forced to stuff her shorts with a 9/11 towel. A Michael Stipe-faced tampon sings “Everybody Bleeds.” It is raunchy, caustic stuff. So why, when Jessi goes home to her mom, sobbing, overwhelmed, seeking comfort—and then ends up screaming, from her room, “Get the hell out, Shannon!”—did I tear up, too? Maybe it’s just been that kind of year. And it’s only January. ♦