For all its wrenching subject matter, the show doesn’t feel like homework. Illustration by Chris Gash

Can a humorless show be great? My bias has long been that truly ambitious dramas are also funny, however submerged or black their jokes. And yet John Ridley’s “American Crime,” on ABC, which is currently ending its third season (and likely its last, given the ratings), breaks that rule and is still a keeper. An astringent outlier in a dizzy age, it has none of the ironic pop songs and retro homages that dominate so many modern cable dramas. It’s serious in an old-fashioned sense: sincere, thoughtful, and heartbreaking.

Like several other recent series, “American Crime” uses an anthology structure: each season tells a separate story, with the cast members in fresh roles. Season 3 is set in North Carolina, in our era of stagnant wages and opiate addiction, starved social services and skewed law enforcement. It begins on a sprawling tomato farm, staffed by migrant workers who sleep in firetraps, neglected by the family that owns the business. But the show keeps stepping off into grim motel rooms, drug-testing offices, an abortion clinic, a dorm-like house filled with runaway teens, and these isolated locations slowly form a constellation. “People die all the time on that farm. Nobody cares,” one minor character explains, exasperated, during a police interrogation. “Women get raped, regular.” His aim isn’t to point out what an injustice this is but how ordinary, how useless it is to even resist. “It’s all set up so that the people at the top don’t get dirty,” he adds, shrugging.

The theme is human trafficking, but that term is insufficient; as the show repeatedly demonstrates, this is modern slavery, camouflaged as labor and protected by the illusion of democracy, its repercussions disguised even to those who enforce it. “I know, this can be depressing,” a social worker named Kimara (Regina King) says, as she solicits a donation from Clair (a layered Lili Taylor). They’re at a fancy benefit for an anti-human-trafficking organization, bonding on a beautiful night. Kimara is black, unhappily single, a debt-ridden do-gooder who longs for a child; Clair is white, miserably married, a late-in-life mom who opted out. The women have plenty in common, too, including infertility—although only one of them can afford I.V.F. But, even as Clair writes a generous check, she’s in denial about her exploitation of her own nanny, an immigrant whose passport is locked up in Clair’s safe.

Along with Kimara and Clair, the characters include Shae (Ana Mulvoy-Ten), a pregnant teen prostitute; Coy (Connor Jessup), a white junkie enlisted to work on the largely Latino farm; Luis (Benito Martinez), a Mexican father searching for his lost son; Jeanette, a newly radicalized wealthy woman (Felicity Huffman, exceptional in every season of the show), who is the wife of one of the farm owners and the sister of a recovering addict; and the remarkable Mickaëlle X. Bizet, as the French-speaking Haitian nanny, Gabrielle, who enters halfway through the season, then steals every episode she’s in.

At base, the show is about exposing systems of false choices: Shae shuttles from an abusive family to a pimp, then to a state-imposed Christian shelter and to Webcam porn, but each option is a trap. On the farm, getting a promotion means tricking recruits into debt, then beating them into productivity. But what really makes “American Crime” pay off is its own stark system: even as we get helplessly attached to certain characters, their stories end, often violently, and the show coolly moves on. The series never buys into the comforting fantasy that exceptional people can escape bad odds through decency or grit just because we’re watching. Instead, it tucks their unhappy endings in where they belong, at the middle of another story, as part of a bigger picture.

Along the way, the show makes unexpected leaps of sympathy: the rich wives, who could be cartoons, turn out to have made bad economic gambles of their own. Even Clair’s bitter husband (Timothy Hutton) gets to state his case, as he bonds with another business owner over their resentment at being breadwinners. “We don’t get a hashtag,” he gripes. But it’s the more marginalized, inarticulate characters—whose lives rarely take center stage on TV—that linger, their struggles composed of ugly anecdotes that might fuel an exposé in Mother Jones. (At times, the journalistic hyperlinks feel deliberate: a line about the “green motel” of sexual abuse in the fields prompted me to Google the topic.) The show’s style isn’t realism; in daily life, social workers tell morbid jokes. But, for all its theatricality, the series isn’t agitprop, either. It’s full of unexpected angles, more like gazing into a prism than like reading a manifesto.

Some of this is due to the strong ensemble, but it’s also the result of a set of distinctive, stylized directorial choices. There’s almost no music. Many scenes are shot from a distance. In one, Coy gets beaten up in the deep background, but the camera blurs the violence, focussing instead on two unmoving observers who stand in the foreground. Then another character—a man we know to be brave and heroic—walks into the frame, sees what’s happening, and, ignoring the crime, turns toward us and walks past the camera, back into his own story. There are other gambits of this type, bold but unflashy trademarks: monologues that flicker with small cuts, like quick blackouts, or a mini flashback. This chronological shuffling is gently disorienting, forcing the viewer into a small seizure of empathy, a taste of lost control.

There’s a risk to this sort of solemnity—and Ridley’s other new show, “Guerrilla,” on Showtime, demonstrates it. A six-episode miniseries about the British Black Power movement in the nineteen-seventies, the series is centered on an internal debate among radicals about how best to fight a hideously racist, anti-immigrant government. (Fight violence with violence? If so, what kind?) It’s fascinating, relevant material, framed with urbane glamour. But, unlike “American Crime,” “Guerrilla” too often feels as if it were cornering us at a party, muttering about hegemony. Despite a strong cast, which includes Freida Pinto and Idris Elba, its rebels are mostly ciphers. There’s a great deal to admire here, in theory. Certainly, the show doesn’t do much spoon-feeding—it delves deeply into the characters’ alliances with German Marxists and Québécois separatists; it shows police torture, graphically. But it verges on being unwatchably glum. The same editing decisions that enliven “American Crime”—the mini flashback, the rigorous use of silence—become tics in “Guerrilla.” Why does one show succeed and the other fail? It’s hard to say, but this may be a case in which an artist, sublimating his vision to a network, produced something less pure but finally more effective than his passion project.

And, for all its wrenching subject matter, “American Crime” doesn’t feel like homework. (It’s glum, too, but watchably so.) At its best, it’s a stark fairy tale about how power can disguise itself. Gabrielle’s story, in particular, is a smartly told fable about the false intimacy of domestic labor. When Gabrielle meets Clair, at the airport, her new position seems like a dream job. She’s shown a lovely bedroom and one small child, to whom she will speak only French. But what she can’t know is that Clair’s marriage is on the rocks—and that, as the marriage worsens, financially and emotionally, the rules will tighten. Soon, Gabrielle needs permission to eat in the kitchen. Her things are moved into a closet, so that Clair can have an office. Yet Clair keeps telling Gabrielle that she’s family, urging her to share her traumatic past. By the time that Gabrielle spins out, and tries to break into the safe, we know she’s doomed: there’s already an archetypal story, about an unstable immigrant worker, that she has unknowingly stepped into. “Mon passeport est dans la maison,” she tries to explain, in the back of a police car. “You would never know she was hiding all these dark things,” Clair says in wonder. And when the cops leave, Clair’s husband snarls at her, “You brought that into this house . . . that crazy woman.” It’s Gabrielle’s tragedy, but Clair and her husband see themselves as the victims. Their sense of innocence is the world’s default setting. ♦