If the end of Parks and Recreation, a bright and cheery series with an occasional edge, left a big hole in the television-comedy landscape, then Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, debuting on Netflix this Friday, comes right in the nick of time. A sprightly, borderline whimsical comedy about a naïve young woman, Kimmy (Ellie Kemper), released from a doomsday cult’s underground bunker after 15 years and forced to contend with the real world, Kimmy Schmidt has an antic charm that grows and grows over time. What first feels a little cloying and overworked becomes, by about the third episode, something endearing and genuinely, cackle-out-loud funny. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a New York-y, scrappy little series with flourishes of sublime absurdity.

Which isn’t surprising, given that the show is from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, the captain and first mate of the dearly departed 30 Rock, which remains the gold standard for scrappy, New York-y, absurdist sitcoms. But Kimmy Schmidt isn’t as pointed a show as 30 Rock, mostly because it’s not an industry satire. There are no specific hard targets being aimed at here. Instead, the series takes a broader, less pessimistic look at contemporary social quirks.

Following a whirlwind press tour with the other “mole women,” Kimmy decides to stay in New York and start a new, exciting life. After some early setbacks, she finds an apartment, a basement unit in Brooklyn owned by a kooky, vaguely libertarian landlady played by the great Carol Kane. The place comes with a roommate, a flamboyant, aspiring, but mostly failing, musical-theater actor named Titus (Broadway vet Tituss Burgess, who was also 30 Rock's D’Fwan). Titus and Kimmy’s roots couldn’t be more different, but that makes them good TV pals and roommates—the one thing they do share is the same pragmatic optimism, which gets them into and out of scrapes with plucky humor. Crucially, though, neither of them are total saps. This show, with its wide-eyed heroine new to the world, could easily be too sunshiny and goofy if Kimmy were a perpetual rube. But she’s got some darkness to her, particularly an occasionally erupting anger, accumulated during her decade and a half underground.

To pay for her apartment, Kimmy gets a job working as a nanny to the spoiled children of an Upper East Side horror show named Jacqueline Voorhes (perfect last name), played by 30 Rock’s Jane Krakowski. Jacqueline is really just a posher version of Krakowski’s 30 Rock psycho diva Jenna Maroney, but that’s fine. Many of the show’s biggest laughs come from Jacqueline, who is blithe and insane, but, unlike Jenna, not a terrible person at heart. No one on Kimmy Schmidt is—the show is amiable in that way, though, again, never too cutesy about it.

All the episodes of the first season will be available on Friday, and they’re just a half-hour long, so I’d encourage you, if you’re not sold on the pilot, to stick with it through Episode 3. That’s when the series really gets going, the jokes moving more quickly, the cast working out some kinks and finding a dynamic that grooves. In the first couple of episodes, the Titus character is certainly likable, but the show has a little trouble figuring out how to use him. But when Burgess is eventually paired up with Kane, things get strange and wonderful. It’s an oddball couple, this big show queen and this mousy old crank, but it works. And it’s one of many aspects of the show that, I think, could only have survived on Netflix. Had this series been on NBC as originally planned, I think these characters’ eccentricities may have been flattened out or oversimplified. With the freedom of Netflix, though, Burgess and Kane and the writers can draw the detailed, weird little portraits they want to. Because of that, Kimmy Schmidt has abundant personality.