A pivotal scene takes place early on at Nadia’s local bodega, where she goes for condoms and briefly watches a stranger who is falling-­down drunk, ultimately deciding to leave him be. Soon after, she is killed by a taxi. Nadia returns to the bodega many times in the course of figuring out what is happening to her. She eventually discovers that the drunken man she ignored, Alan, went on to kill himself the same night that she died, and furthermore that he’s friends with Farran, the cashier at the bodega. (Nadia, it should go without saying, is also tight with Farran.) At one point, Nadia asks Farran how he knows Alan. He tells her that they worked together at a cannery in Alaska. When she expresses surprise, he clarifies that he was kidding.

“We actually pledged Alpha Delta in college,” he says. “That cannery thing, though? It’s pretty good. I put it in my novel.” This is not a joke: In that scene, he’s behind the counter, typing on his laptop.

The actual, transactional quasi friendships that New Yorkers have with their bodega guys are plenty interesting. Like a priest, a bodega guy gets to know the shameful weaknesses of his regulars, who must assume on some level that he’s not secretly writing their stories in his own head. His perspective would be an interesting one to get to know, but in “Russian Doll,” what’s curious about this relationship is rendered null with a couple of lines of dialogue. In trying to counteract harmful stereotypes, the show has succeeded in doing something altogether stranger: erasing diversity through the act of depicting it. By making Farran an aspirant to the same sort of success the show’s writers value, by making him a guy who thinks working at a cannery is inherently absurd, something you’d put in a novel, “Russian Doll” suggests that everyone in this city, at the end of the day, is ultimately the same, sharing identical aesthetic and professional aspirations, and we’d know that if we only paid closer attention.

That attitude fits with the moral of the show, which is that strangers hold the key to our salvation. The fact that they possess interiority, and that we generally don’t care, winds up being the cause of the time warp — and the way out of it. Alan and Nadia team up, eventually determining that they’re in some sort of purgatorial punishment and must right the karmic wrong that occurred in the bodega: Nadia must save Alan from his suicide. By the season finale, they are back at Farran’s store, but separated in alternate dimensions, strangers to each other once again. They must convince the other that they know them deeply in order to save them from their self-­destruction, and only then are they freed. In the ecstatic closing sequence, they take part in some impromptu crust­punk Mummers parade, led by a homeless man named Horse (who, just like Farran, has been revealed to be a member of the professional class in disguise).

Watching this, I couldn’t help being reminded of the first episode of the second season of “High Maintenance,” which contains a similarly exuberant scene. This episode tells the stories of New Yorkers reacting to some world-­changing event; the show plays coy, but it’s widely interpreted to be the 2016 presidential election. One of these New Yorkers is a bar­back forced to stay late because the bar is so busy, which in turn makes him late to pick up his young son from a relative’s apartment. He takes him home on the subway and presents him with a balloon. It’s a sweet story, and a clever one — a perfect rejoinder to any privileged New Yorker who has wondered, coming home from the bars late at night, what sort of parent would keep their kid out at this hour. The boy starts batting his balloon around, causing a scene, but rather than being annoyed, the nighthawks of New York — a nurse in scrubs, workers in safety vests — join in, smiles breaking across their faces as they come together, even in such uncertain times, for one sublime and spontaneous moment of laughter and joy. This is the New York City my generation dreams of, an A.S.M.R. role-play of cosmopolitan harmony, a city of weak bonds that generate nothing but warmth, a place within the flow of history and outside it all at once.

The fact that The Guy works in the delivery business makes “High Maintenance” unusually attuned to the city’s shifting anxieties and mores. Of course, as the eccentric local historian Timothy (Speed) Levitch explains in one episode, New York has always been a delivery town, ever since Collect Pond went sour with pollution and the city had to start importing water. But in recent years, it has become even more so. Nearly every subway car is plastered with ads for stuff you can have delivered right to your door (mattresses, bedding, electronic-­toothbrush heads, meal kits, perfumes, generic Viagra) pitched in some approximation of online Millennial argot. Seamless, the dominant force in food delivery here, runs ads that make its value proposition grimly explicit: “Over 8 million people in New York City, and we help you avoid them all”; “Nothing ruins a good meal like other New Yorkers.” Some even lament the difficulty of calling restaurants where the staff might not understand you. Another says: “Food delivered faster than this neighborhood is gentrifying.”

What makes “High Maintenance” so intelligent is that it also documents the widespread isolation and alienation that make the fantasy so seductive. The Guy’s work brings him into the ­spaces where this loneliness is felt most acutely, and his easygoing charm allows his clients to open up to him, and to us. In the new season, you meet a young artist who hires a sex worker for a “boyfriend experience” and finds him somewhat needy; there’s an asexual (but not aromantic) amateur magician, a recurring character, who must overcome his aversion to physical touch when he starts dating an intimacy coordinator. One of the show’s best episodes is shot from the perspective of a dog, left at home all day in his Queens apartment by his depressive, workaholic (and, it is implied, Trump-­voting) owner. The dog falls madly in love with the woman who comes to walk him. She’s attractive by human standards, but you get the sense the dog would love anyone who let him out for that cherished hour. In one poignant scene, the dog goes out with his owner on the weekend and encounters his dog friends from his weekday walks. He barks to greet them and is scolded by the man; neither owner knows a thing about the expansive inner lives of their pets, having been forced by city living to out­source their care.