There’s a seductive message in all the serendipity. In The New York Times Magazine last month, Willy Staley argued that the series’s pageant of healthy cross-tribe interactions soothes an audience made up, in significant measure, of gentrifiers. “While New York is still the pleasure dome that less ethically burdened depictions (Sex and the City, for example, or even Girls) made it out to be, it’s no longer quite so easy to enjoy without reservation,” Staley writes. “There is some sense that this all comes at a cost—one that mostly falls on others.” The remedy from High Maintenance—and contemporaries such as Russian Doll and Master of None—is to portray the Big Apple as “a moral training ground—for protagonist and viewer alike,” Staley writes. The stereotypical High Maintenance viewer spends his or her evening shut away from neighbors while bingeing on depictions of a city that “forces you to become a better version of yourself, the one where strangers come together and connect.”

Staley hit upon a key appeal of High Maintenance (a show he, overall, praises). Yet his analysis carries the radical implication that something about this social moment makes it wrong to pair dramatic catharsis with a realistic aesthetic. After all, if High Maintenance has a balming effect, that’s in part because it’s doing what almost all TV ends up doing, which is creating a satisfying narrative. You meet a character, and you expect that character to go on a transformational journey that leaves everyone okay. Real life, in general, doesn’t move in short, interesting arcs; actual strangers tend to stay strange. As High Maintenance sorts through the chaos of city life and examines the most intriguing characters it finds, it educates and creates empathy—but also commits voyeurism, contrivance, and feel-goodism.

To acknowledge that dynamic does not undermine the greatness of the series; rather, it strangely deepens it, because you’re then meeting the show at its own level. No one is cannier about High Maintenance—and the urban-explorer genre it traffics in—than High Maintenance is. As it nests stories within stories, or daisy-chains them together, it continually checks its characters on the validity of the stories they tell themselves about their own life. Often, the action is in watching characters’ personal set of ethics meet up with the reality that the people around them are, whether or not they always recognize it, living out their own narratives and values. It asks, again and again, what storytelling is for, and it’s okay with an ambivalent answer.

It’s fitting that the fourth season begins with a coastal-elite crossover event: High Maintenance meets This American Life. The first episode depicts a programming meeting of the legendary public-radio show, where a mix of actors and real-life staffers—including Ira Glass—pitch story ideas on the theme of “recycling.” One person, Yara (Natalie Woolams-Torres), volunteers a tale about her parents breaking up and getting back together. Glass loves the idea and asks if her parents would be willing to talk. Without hesitation, she answers yes.