Here is a good barometer of success: does Lucy Lawless like you? Does she go out of her way to watch your crappy open-mic performances? Does she like you enough to let you babysit her children? Tig Notaro can answer yes to all those questions. The erstwhile Xena: Warrior Princess production assistant has transformed into a star stand-up comedian, and is now searing her way through Hollywood with One Mississippi, an auterish dramedy (a.k.a. the year’s hottest accessory) that returns to Amazon for its second season on September 8.

Notaro’s rise to fame—galvanized in part by a 2012 stand-up set in which she announced she had cancer, and which then went viral—is an oft-retold recent Hollywood success story. But when reflecting on all this recently, Notaro went way back, to her early days as a P.A. out in Los Angeles, fielding phone calls while the Xena cast and crew shot the seminal adventure series in New Zealand. By Notaro’s count, she was “maybe the worst employee they ever had.”

“But they told me they liked me so much, and I made everyone laugh, [so] they kept me around,” she says. “That’s what Lucy Lawless tells everyone.”

Lawless split her time between L.A. and New Zealand, always happily letting then-26-year-old Notaro babysit her daughter, Daisy. The nascent comedian would entertain her between press events or take her to Disneyland. “I remember a friend of mine called me . . . I was on a roller-coaster that was going up and clicking and people were screaming and my friend was like ‘where are you?’ ” Notaro recalls. “I was like ‘I’m on a roller-coaster with Xena’s daughter.’ It was the epitome of the friend that moves to Hollywood and is having a weird life that you can't really relate to.”

Notaro and Lawless remained close friends, close enough, in fact, that Lawless would go to the up-and-comer’s open-mic nights at “coffee shops and little dinky bars,” and later attend Notaro’s 2015 wedding in Mississippi to wife Stephanie Allyne. The couple are now also on-screen collaborators, with Allyne starring in both seasons of One Mississippi.

The first season_,_ which Notaro writes, produces, and stars in, leaned heavily on the dramatic notes of Notaro’s real life; Allyne even has a role as Kate, Notaro’s will-they-won’t-they crush/radio co-host. The pilot began with her character, Tig Bovaro, returning to Mississippi after getting a double mastectomy and overcoming an intestinal disease, only to watch her mother get taken off life support. At times, it’s less a comedy and more a series of devastations, accentuated with a few punch lines.

The second season strikes a more lighthearted balance, delving into everyone’s love lives (Sheryl Lee Ralph turns in a delightful performance in this realm). Though the pilot will always be “more true” to Notaro’s life, Season 2 allowed for more comedy and more fictional exploration.

But Notaro’s comedy remains unafraid of taking on heavy, real-world issues. The Season 2 writers room got together back in January, right after Donald Trump’s election, which naturally spurred a lot of political conversation. Several plot points were inspired by those chats; in one scene Bovaro and Kate discuss being “Trump refugees,” figuring out their dream place to escape for the next four years (New Zealand), which is something the all-female writing team of Mississippi would discuss every day. “We were all trying to figure out where to go and what to do and how to be safe and happy. . . . It was a never-ending conversation.”