The pilot, which debuted in 2015 before the full season was ordered, establishes the order of the magazine, where women are hired as “researchers” and paired with male “reporters.” This means, in the words of Patti (Genevieve Angelson), a researcher, that “we report, investigate, and write files for the reporters; they do a pass, write their names on them, and then the stories go to press.” In accordance with dramatic law, the researchers are divided neatly into stock characters: Patti is the freespirited, hippie one; Cindy (Erin Darke) is the repressed, mousy one; Jane (Anna Camp) is the blonde, snobby one; and Grace Gummer plays Nora Ephron, who gets hired in the first episode, quits after she’s refused credit for a story, and then disappears for much of the rest of the season.

The most obvious analog for Good Girls Revolt is Mad Men, if only because it’s a workplace drama set in a similar period, with similarly focused attention to detail and cultural references (the pilot revolves around a story about reports of violence at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969). But Mad Men, for all its brilliance, was so highly stylized that its consideration of gender politics often felt abstract, or like something viewed from a distance. Good Girls Revolt, by contrast, is entirely driven by its female characters, and much more committed to expressing the urgency of their cause. And not just in the workplace. Cindy, in the first episode, realizes her husband has made a hole in her diaphragm; a fleet of male editors dismiss a source willing to go on the record because of her record of sexual promiscuity; and a backup singer tells Patti she’ll be fired if she does anything beyond “look good and sound good” behind the band she’s been hired to serve.

When the show does consider its male characters more closely, it often falters. Finn (Chris Diamantopoulos), the editor of News of the Week, is a charming rogue intent on emulating the more groundbreaking journalism being published at rival magazines, namely Rolling Stone. But he’s oddly two-dimensional, while Wick (Jim Belushi) is a harrumphing stereotype of a sexist who rarely talks to a woman unless he’s asking her to get him a cup of coffee. (One exception is when one of them quits, and he sneers, “Your name is all you have in journalism, so good luck Nora Ephron,” a curse that’s comical now in its wrongheadedness.) The male reporters initially exist as antagonists to plague their savvier female colleagues, although gradually they get shades of complexity as the series progresses.

Because a lawsuit isn’t enough to pad out a 10-episode series (like almost everything else on streaming services, Good Girls Revolt would materially benefit from having its hourlong episodes trimmed to 45 minutes or so), the show has extended subplots about the various awakenings its female characters are experiencing. Jane, one of the most stereotypically Anna Campish characters in Camp’s showreel, has her future ambitions (and her virginity) reserved for a guy whom she’s been dating for two years but who hasn’t proposed. Her WASP mother feeds her diet pills that are basically methamphetamine while her father encourages her to get a new job at a law firm because he’s concerned News of the Week is becoming too Jewish.