In the second season of the Australian series “Please Like Me,” our millennial hero, Josh (Josh Thomas, the show’s creator), visits his mom, Rose, at a psychiatric hospital, carrying a gift box of bonbons. In the cafeteria, he’s drawn into a high-stakes competition for the last piece of candy, as patients vie to tell the most outlandish first-sex story, in a wave of bubbly one-upmanship. Finally, they turn to the silent Hannah (played by Hannah Gadsby, who is best known to American audiences from her Netflix special, “Nanette”). “I was raped,” she says. The table panics. “Oh, Hannah, I’m really sorry,” Josh says. “If Mum had known, I’m sure she wouldn’t have asked.”

“No, I don’t mind,” Hannah deadpans. “I just knew, the whole time you were talking, I was going to get the chocolate.”

It’s a typical sequence for “Please Like Me,” a gorgeously made, psychologically observant comedy that lets vulnerable people own their jokes. Rude and gentle, often simultaneously, it’s part of that nimble TV genre—sometimes called traumedy, sometimes dramedy, and how I wish there were a better name—which tends to focus on youngish single persons, adrift. In this case, the drifter is Josh, a persnickety, self-abnegating student living in Melbourne. In the pilot, Josh kisses a boy for the first time and begins, in an endearingly diffident style, life as a gay man. “I think I’ll miss vaginas,” he later tells his straight best friend, Tom. “You know, so nifty.” In the episode with the kiss, Josh learns that Rose has attempted suicide. The show continues in this way, bridging joy and tragedy, a blend unusually true to life.

When “Please Like Me” débuted, in 2013, it was sometimes pitched, reductively but understandably, as “the gay ‘Girls.’ ” It also bears some family resemblance to Tig Notaro’s “One Mississippi” and Jill Soloway’s “Transparent,” as well as to more recent projects such as the lovely deaf-culture series “This Close,” on Sundance; Desiree Akhavan’s terrific, spiky new series, “The Bisexual,” on Hulu; and the Irish codependent-friends show “Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope,” on Netflix. These shows have become a thriving mode of intimate, quasi-auteurist television-making; they’re also one of the rare places you find diverse portraits of gay life. Their specificity is their charm, as with “Dinette,” a sleepy gem on Vimeo, set in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, or the very funny “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo,” available on YouTube.

In older ratings models, shows like this—niche, improvisational in style, with marginalized characters at their center—might never get made. On streaming, the best of them can gain an appreciative audience, years later. “Please Like Me,” which ran in the U.S., largely unheralded, on the now-defunct Pivot, is thankfully available on Hulu: four seasons, thirty-two episodes, with a satisfying, appropriately bittersweet ending.

As I caught up on Thomas’s series, it became my answer to a common question: “What’s a show that will comfort me, not make me feel more miserable?” For a series with so many unhappy characters, “Please Like Me” is a surprisingly joyful watch. Still, what makes the show unique, and lends it a rare toughness, is the bond between Josh and Rose, who is played with bravura fragility by Debra Lawrence. Rose—mouthy, brash, unpredictable—is hard to deal with, but you root for her, as she tries various medications, struggles with relationships, and comes to terms with her diagnosis as bipolar. Josh loves his mother deeply; he also views her as a burden. The show is refreshingly uncorny about subjects like this. As humane as it is, “Please Like Me” has none of the bullying positivity of more formulaic “issue TV”: it allows for the rough fact that not everything can be fixed. That might sound depressing. It’s not; it’s a relief.

The show’s joyfulness is due as much to its confident aesthetic sensuousness as to its subject matter. Each episode is named for a food-related subject—Josh is a passionate if slapdash home chef, raising chickens in his back yard. There’s music throughout, including many sing-alongs. Like Josh in his kitchen, the show continually turns scraps—of dialogue, of plot—into something hearty. During a Christmas episode, the table unites in faith in the power of gravy. “It’s like the heart of a guide dog!” Tom exclaims. Minor characters are often as vivid as central ones. Along with the depressive Hannah, who moves in with Rose, the ensemble includes Josh’s stoical dad, Alan, and his new girlfriend, Mae; Josh’s high-school girlfriend, the equally adrift Claire; and his hangdog friend, Tom (played by Thomas’s own best friend, Tom Ward).

The show’s treatment of Josh’s sexual adventures, like its treatment of mental illness, is idiosyncratic and unsentimental, romantic without dipping into formula. In the first season, Josh comes out with very little struggle. He has his share of issues—a melancholic squeamishness, a longing for affection that is undermined by flashes of coldness—but they’re particular to him. Finding equilibrium with his parents, one of whom is essentially paying him to help take care of the other, often feels like the bigger crisis.

At the same time, the show pushes back at homophobia—subtly, without cant—by celebrating gentleness, candor, and vulnerability, the ebb and flow of emotion among people who mean well. Once in a while, it does tie these questions directly to queerness. In “Simple Carbohydrates,” Josh is dating Arnold (Keegan Joyce), a clinically anxious young man who had a stay at Rose’s hospital. When Alan crashes Josh’s party, in a distressed state, the group falls into an odd role-play, as a way of distracting him. Josh insists that Alan act the role of Arnold’s bigoted dad, so that Arnold can practice coming out. “O.K., O.K.,” Alan says, stiffly, trying to get in character as a cartoon ideal of a tolerant father. “Well, that’s great news. Thanks for telling me. Maybe, on the weekend, you can take me to the shops and teach me to dress better.”

“Sure thing, pal,” Arnold replies, tightly and brightly.

Josh frowns, and says, “Mmm. I didn’t like it. No, I didn’t like it, not one bit.” Arnold has to sing, Josh maintains—in fact, he has to sing in the emotional, tellingly effeminate way that Arnold’s father hated, when his son was in the school choir. Everyone involved—Tom is there, too; even Claire is on Skype—is on tenterhooks. But, eventually, Arnold stands and sings. As he performs an a-cappella version of Sia’s “Chandelier,” Josh directs his father how to react. “Sit, grumpy,” he tells him, before ushering him into the living room. “And then, as the song changes, gradually change your mind.”

In a small masterpiece of performance, as Arnold sings, his voice rising and falling in this song about alcoholism—“One two three, one two three, drink”—Alan at first listens, then, as the camera moves closer, we see his eyes soften. We watch him, as Arnold’s father, absorb the beauty, the feminine loveliness of his son’s voice. We’re watching everyone watch him, too, witnessing the miracle: the performance of family love becoming real, behind the mask of another man, as Alan makes the leap from “accepting” his gay child to adoring him, seeing him fully. “That’s my boy,” he tells Arnold, as Josh and his friends tear up. “That’s my son.”

It’s a lovely and intuitive sequence that feels endlessly replayable, like a perfect pop song. The show is full of such moments, conversations that play like music. One small delight to binge-watching the series is seeing every iteration of the opening credits, which are set to the severely groovy “I’ll Be Fine,” by Clairy Browne and the Bangin’ Rackettes. “Oh the good lord knows it / I left better behind / I’ll be fiiiiiine,” Browne croons, over a sequence that continually changes, from one meal to another. Mostly, Josh and his friends dance as they chop and fry. When Rose enters the hospital, the song plays over a sequence of patients getting pills from the nurses. Once, it’s sung by a drag queen at a bar. In a remarkable episode called “Scroggin,” in which Josh and his mother go camping in Tasmania, Rose sings it, solo, during their hike. These moments make a small show feel capacious, a welcoming place in which to change your mind. ♦