“Tuca and Bertie,” a new animated series on Netflix, was created by Lisa Hanawalt, an illustrator for the dark Hollywood satire “BoJack Horseman.” Like “BoJack,” it’s set in a trippy universe full of visual puns and talking animals—mostly birds, although there are also chain-smoking trees and gossipy cats, not to mention a breast that pops off one character’s chest, puts on a flowered hat, and wanders away in a huff. The heroines of the show, a sweet, loopy friendship sitcom, are a raunchy toucan named Tuca (voiced by Tiffany Haddish) and her best friend, an anxious parakeet named Bertie (Ali Wong). Childlike in style, with adult themes, the series plays out through a scrim of surreal frames, showing ordinary actions—from baking to sex—through odd filters, from retro video games to yarn dolls that illustrate a painful memory. It’s an imperfect show about feeling off-kilter, struggling to comprehend your own life.

It’s also the latest in a deluge of TV series that feel like a direct response to the #MeToo movement, touching on third-rail themes that are meant not merely to comfort or inspire but to unsettle. In one of “Tuca and Bertie” ’s central story lines (which I’ll spoil here, so bail if you care about that kind of thing), Bertie, who is working as a corporate cog at a magazine company called Condé Nest, gets her dream gig, as an after-hours apprentice to the celebrity baker Pastry Pete, a brilliant penguin who created a cruller/bundt-cake hybrid called the “crunt.” “He’s got the body of a tenure-track professor but the arms of an adjunct,” Bertie tells herself, deep in a confusing crush.

But, from her first day on the job, Bertie is thrown off by her boss’s haughty air, his demands that she say “Yes, Chef” and never question him. Earlier, she’d attended a female-empowerment meeting, after getting sexually harassed at her day job. (That was the day that her breast popped off her body, leaving a black hole in her chest.) But Bertie blindly obeys Pete’s orders. Maybe this is how chefs are supposed to behave? Pete beckons her to the stove, to inspect a banana roux that he’s preparing. Then he pushes Bertie’s head down, so that the steam hits her face as she struggles to free herself. It’s a deeply weird act—hard to describe, let alone to define.

Bertie runs into the bathroom, shoves her hand down her pants, and masturbates. In the aftermath, she has disturbing sexual dreams about her boss, and they make her feel stupid and crazy. Pete is an abusive creep, but he’s also her role model and her route to career success. When Pete hires a new apprentice, a chipper millennial named Dakota (“With a Y—the Y is silent . . . and invisible”), Bertie and the younger songbird bond. Then, one day, Pete does the same thing to Dakota, as Bertie looks on, saying nothing. When Dakota asks Bertie if it ever happened to her, she stutters, making excuses: “You don’t understand—it’s just part of the job and how he teaches. He’s very passionate.”

“Why are you defending him?” Dakota yells. “And you didn’t warn me. You knew what he did was wrong, right?” In some sense, however, it seems as if Bertie didn’t know, until she saw someone else’s reaction to Pete’s behavior. When Dakota quits, it sends Bertie spinning, grappling with childhood memories, and with the blurred lines between authority and abuse, flirtation and exploitation.

It’s a powerful story, precisely because it doesn’t leave out the discomfort. Like much of Hanawalt’s work, in her illustrated cartoon books as well as on “BoJack Horseman,” “Tuca and Bertie” is at its best when it lingers on raw sensations. Sex is confusing; power is, too. Tuca, who is newly sober, can’t figure out how to behave on a date, because her default mode is binge-drinking and blacking out. Even after Bertie quits her apprenticeship, her rage and guilt are never resolved—and, although a bird poops on Pete’s head and Tuca entraps him with a viral video, he suffers no major repercussions. He stays a star chef.

“Tuca and Bertie” is a wave in a sea of such responses. In some cases, older shows have rewritten themselves, reinterpreting stories that once seemed romantic or funny, finding darker undercurrents and new angles. In series ranging from “Fosse/Verdon,” FX’s Broadway-musical-antihero show, to Gen Z soaps like Freeform’s “Good Trouble” and “The Bold Type,” as well as on network sitcoms like “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and cable dramedies like “Barry,” creators are visibly adjusting to, and at times struggling with, the changing landscape.

Television has always been a delivery system for morality. In 1977, Edith Bunker fought off an attempted rape (and Archie never called her “dingbat” again); in 1989, on “A Different World,” Dwayne Wayne learned about consent. These stories, which were packaged as “very special episodes,” were regularly treated as big cultural events—maybe because they stood in striking contrast to the way sexual violence was portrayed on crime shows and soaps, which tended to be hardboiled or lurid. Sometimes, as in the wildly popular Luke-and-Laura romance on the soap opera “General Hospital,” rape was more like an act of passionate overkill, a bump on the road to true love.

Meanwhile, workplace harassment was framed as romance or slapstick—the boss chasing his secretary around the desk, a current that ran under even beloved shows like “M*A*S*H” and “Cheers.” The “very special episode” was aggressively well intentioned, a wholesome corrective. But even the best of them were polemical gestures, not artistic ones. As Samuel Goldwyn once put it, about movies and morality, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union”—and television, in the public imagination, was Western Union.

When Dr. Melfi was raped, in a parking-garage stairwell, on “The Sopranos,” in 2001, it marked a turning point. This wasn’t because the scene was particularly graphic but because Melfi was a central character in the show. Most effectively, the plot was about what didn’t happen—Melfi never asked Tony to exact revenge, a quiet ethical choice in a show about moral corruption. The episode, which startled viewers and created enormous buzz, seemed to embolden TV creators. In the two decades that followed, plotlines about sexual violence proliferated, often serving as the backstory for characters. This phenomenon occurred in tandem with an increase in shows created by women: when women’s lives are taken seriously, sexual violence is part of the drama. But there was an ugliness in what became a narrative arms race, with its own clichés; for creators, merely showing violent misogyny, however shoddily, sometimes seemed to double as a signifier of artistic seriousness. On the first season of “True Detective,” a flayed and ravaged female corpse was an object to be gazed at in horror, but there wasn’t much difference between what the camera ogled and what it critiqued.

These recent shows mark a different kind of progress—an outward sign of inward changes, as if anxious debates within writers’ rooms have flowed into scripts. With few exceptions, these stories aren’t prechewed moral lessons or easy fables about heroism, and they aren’t engaging in “Game of Thrones”-style escalation, either, turning harassment stories into pornographic melodrama. Not every such plot is successful: a few feel tone-deaf or overly cynical. But the sharpest are reshaping television’s boundaries, more often through comedy than through drama.