As soon as I left the South, I became really proud of being from the South. Part of that was done in defiance of New York City, to stand out amongst all the Yankees. Like, apparently water skiing is not the default type of skiing? And there are people that don’t know what hush puppies are. Also, WTF is “pop”–it’s all coke! I spent the first 22 years of my life in Tennessee, actively avoiding country music. I’ve spent the last 11 years of my life in New York, extolling the careers of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn and bragging about how I grew up going to Johnny Cash’s church (because I did!). I have a lot of Southern pride as a New Yorker… even if my home region now gives me a whole lotta pause.

I came out to myself just under a year before my big move to the city, so I only spent a few months living in Tennessee as a gay man. But since then, every subsequent visit to the South–especially as I’ve gone home with my boyfriend, then fiancé, then husband–has been slightly more tense than the last. Sure, that’s partly because of a soft-diagnosed anxiety problem, but it’s also because every single time Tennessee makes national headlines, it’s for super regressive anti-LGBT laws (and sometimes the headlines are about Usher and Justin Timberlake). As goofy as it might sound to straight people, I am more afraid of going to a Walmart in the rural South than I am any part of New York City.

That is the baggage I bring to Netflix’s new Queer Eye series, a reboot of the Bravo reality show that brought gay culture to the mainstream way back when I was a deeply closeted college student. The new series, which once again features five fabulous specialists making over one average Joe, is not set in and around New York City like the old show. Instead, Queer Eye hit the road for Atlanta, Georgia (a city I went to plenty of times as a kid to see the Braves play–or rather, sit in the stadium reading comics while a game happened near me). This relocation is a big change that ripples out to affect every part of the show–for the better.

Queer Eye in NYC is playing the makeover game on “easy.” Queer Eye in Atlanta, though, is playing the makeover game on “ÜBER HARDCORE.” Gay men in NYC? Not a shocker. And the straight men in the original series could reach out and touch international, top-notch culture and cuisine. That’s not relatable to a vast swath of America, who are perfectly served with the big box stores and recognizable restaurants they have in their hometowns. The new Queer Eye thrills at those limitations, though, and it leads to some truly fantastic, heartwarming, and useful television. Instead of going to a designer menswear store, style expert Tan France takes laid back grandad Tom to a thrift store where all the clothes are arranged by color. There he’s able to point out the colors on the spectrum that clash with his client’s lupus, giving him tips that he (and plenty of people watching at home!) can actually apply to their life.

In another episode, the experts take father-of-six Bobby to a Target and they GET. TO. WORK. Tan gives him a super stylish makeover pulling from Target’s clothing line, food expert Antoni Porowski takes them on a tour of the food section, and then they pass Bobby and his kids off to grooming guru Jonathan Van Ness for the lowdown on the hair and skincare aisle. That is the show at its most visibly Southern, as people are way more likely to shop at big, omnipresent stores like Target and Walmart. Showing how to work those aisles out not only makes sense for the guy they’re making over, it also makes sense to an entire region (hell, the entire country!).

But more so than the setting, the men on the show are so Southern in so many different ways. Tom and Cory are the good ol’ boys I’m familiar with from my grandparents’ East Tennessee Southern Baptist church or the crowds from my high school football games. But Neal, a 30-something of Indian descent, also lives around Atlanta and is an app developer. And there’s 30-year-old Joe, a mild-mannered stand-up that’s stuck in his parents’ basement. These guys are all Southern, the way Southern men were and the way Southern men are. And that includes AJ, a guy with a twist that I don’t want to spoil, but a twist I really related to. As a representation of the men of the South, Queer Eye shows that they aren’t all rednecks–and it also shows that proud rednecks are more than just their homemade margaritas.

And that gets us to the Trump of it all, the red state elephant in the bed of the oversized pickup truck the Fab Five drive around Georgia in. Even if the original Queer Eye had been filmed in the South, the Georgia of 2003 feels drastically less polarized than the Georgia of 2018. It is impossible to exist in America right now and not be tempted to write off whole coasts or regions just because everything is too hard to deal with. Queer Eye, surprisingly, deals with it. And it deals with it well.

I will go on the record as saying that this show, specifically episode 3, is the only profile of a Trump voter any of us ever need to watch again. In between quips and tips, the show allows the Fab Five and their guy-of-the-week to work out some real stuff–and sometimes it’s the Fab Five that have to get checked. I did not expect a Netflix reboot of a fun and quirky lifestyle show to address issues like the tensions between Black Lives Matter and the police, or the push and pull between religion and sexual orientation, or the restrictive ideas of what gay men are allowed to be, or even the heartbreak that men feel but then feel like they can’t talk about. But all of that is in this show, and–surprise within a surprise–it never feels exploitative. It feels uncomfortable, yes, but it also feels real. God bless the editors, the men doing the talking, or all of the above, but we see real moments of human connection.

It gives me hope, I type, thus making a sharp turn towards direct sincerity. The Fab Five have the kind of conversations that I struggle to have with my family back home. They go into places that would terrify me, like one episode that drops Van Ness (all sass in an off-the-shoulder black number) into a veterans’ hall packed with Southern World War II vets. What gives me life is not only seeing the way these unsuspecting Southerners respect the Fab Five, but also seeing the way the Fab Five respects everyone they come into contact with. All the cutting snark of the original series has been replaced with relentless empathy.

I don’t know if I have it in me yet, to make peace and push forward regarding the region where my roots run deep. I don’t know when I will feel really welcome and free to be me in the state that made me. But totally by surprise, Queer Eye gave me some hope, and the Fab Five lead by example.

Where to stream Queer Eye