On the one hand, sure, Unbreakable's what-they-are versus who-they-are discrepancies are the stuff of sitcomic cliché: People are more than they seem, and books are more than their covers, and special snowflakes and unique butterflies and the containment of multitudes and all that. And the wacky humanity of the familiar stranger has, of course, been celebrated across TV’s history, from Ralph Kramden to Doug Heffernan to Mindy Lahiri. In that sense, Unbreakable is, despite its status as a "Netflix show," quite traditional.

In another sense, though, Unbreakable is productively innovative. This is Gatsby, in its way, for the age of Facebook and "The End of Men." Everyone has secrets. Everyone has pasts. Everyone is struggling and aching and wanting, trying to be, and also not be, normal; characters' wildly different interpretations of what that normalcy entails, however, suggest that monolithic fit-innery, the stuff of high school cafeterias, is finally outdated.

Unbreakable doesn’t simply flesh out its characters; it actively and insistently offers the limelight to characters who would, in so many other contexts, play merely supporting roles. Characters who would, in other words, otherwise be marginalized. “Black, gay, and old?” Titus laments as he walks down the street in a Cosby-esque sweater. “Oh, I'm not even going to know which box to check on the hate crime form.” Which is—classic Fey— a small joke made big through a sweeping insight. And yet we’re hearing it from Titus’ perspective, and, because we know him, we’re able to put it into the context of Titus’ experience as a struggler and a survivor. Same with Dong and Lillian and so many of the other inhabitants of Kimmy's world. Unbreakable isn’t just a show about underdogs; it’s a show about giving voice to the voiceless. It is a show that celebrates the people who are often, in life, made to live in the margins.

And that makes it particularly apt for the moment we’re in—a moment that, you could argue, is finding new platforms for empathy. We live in an age newly obsessed with otherness, an age in which “What It’s Like to Be X” is a common headline in news stories and “Ask Me Anything” is a popular rubric on reddit. We have Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest and the “Real Housewives” franchise, and those, on top of everything else, have given us new insights into the vast diversity of human experience. We have new platforms for curiosity and, within it, empathy. We have The Wire and Breaking Bad and Orange Is the New Black—shows told from the perspective of people who are, in important ways, far removed from the norm-happy collectives of sitcomic tradition.

And now we have Unbreakable, a show that has many ridiculous characters, but that saves the brunt of its ridicule for the ones who would normally find themselves above mockery—in the context of sitcoms, yes, but also in the context of life. As ThinkProgress’s Jessica Goldstein points out, there are precious few white men on the show; the ones who are there are pretty much there to be mocked. There’s Julian Voorhees, the smarmy hedge-funder; Logan Beekman, the Connecticut trust-funder so wealthy that his parents trained him to have a British accent; and, of course, Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, Kimmy’s kidnapper and the founder of Savior Rick’s Spooky Church of the Scary-pocalypse, who is given a ridiculous name and an even more ridiculous man-mullet, but even more importantly robbed of a backstory that puts his absurdity into context.