Killing Eve ends its first season on Sunday, and the drama series has achieved some marvelous things since it premiered in April. It propelled 46-year-old Sandra Oh to the top of the most-wanted leading-actress lists for her crackling portrayal of Eve Polastri, a brainy intelligence agent in Britain who becomes obsessed with tracking a female assassin. It cemented our belief in the versatile genius of Phoebe Waller-Bridge—Solo drone star and Fleabag mastermind—who found a way to meld Killing Eve’s messy intimacy with the thrills of a traditional format, and to fill stock genre roles with female characters who turn clichés inside out. And it introduced us to Villanelle—as played by Jodie Comer—one of the most magnetic, roguish psychopaths in TV history.

The thriller also delivered a ratings bonanza to BBC America. Thanks to word of mouth and glowing reviews, Killing Eve increased the cable network’s audience by 41% over the course of its first six episodes, a leap that’s rare for ad-supported dramas. That’s a huge relief for BBC America’s president and general manager Sarah Barnett, who already had doubled her bet on Waller-Bridge by ordering a second season of the show before it even premiered.

For Barnett, who took over at BBC America in 2014 after nurturing such critically acclaimed series as Rectify and Top of the Lake at Sundance Channel, Killing Eve has the potential to help define the network as a space for daring drama. She and fellow Fleabag fan Nena Rodrigue, BBC America’s head of original programming, began developing Killing Eve a few years ago. They were attracted, Barnett said, “by the thought of Phoebe being attached to an hour-long drama that had some of the big swings in storytelling that our audience loves, [but set] in this very female world.”

BBC America had attracted a ferociously devoted following for the twisted-sister drama Orphan Black, a fandom that came to be known as the #CloneClub. With the series ending after five seasons last August (after earning its star, Tatiana Maslany, a lead-actress Emmy in 2016), Barnett was keen to build on that enthusiasm for oddball, female-driven genre programming.

Rather than pushing Waller-Bridge to make more of a conventional thriller, Barnett encouraged her to probe deeper into the psychology of these women. “The note we kept giving, actually, was, ‘Keep it weird,’” she said. Barnett recalls a specific scene in the second episode when the head of MI6’s Russia Desk, Carolyn Martens (played by veteran actress Fiona Shaw), who recruits Eve to help catch assassin Villanelle, is showing her their secret office in a seedy London back alley. As she’s opening the door, the very uptight, distinguished Carolyn says matter-of-factly, “I once saw a rat drink from a can of Coke down there. Used both hands”—and then strides off. “It was such a crazy, almost absurdist thing!” Barnett marveled. “Those were the kinds of moments where we really urged Phoebe to just lean into.”

In this peak-TV environment where viewers are overwhelmed by hundreds of shows perpetually available, Barnett said a network like BBC America (which doesn’t have a huge marketing budget) needs to make distinctive, attention-grabbing shows that, like Killing Eve, offer “a creative, slightly warped perspective on the world.” Everything in the series is a little bit off-kilter, including the borderline-romantic relationship between hunter and hunted, and the arch sense of humor the show is steeped in. Deeply emotional moments are inevitably undercut with jagged jokes or slivers of brutality; in the penultimate episode, an interaction between Villanelle and her handler Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) veers from sweet to cruel in a matter of seconds, and eventually ends in pathos. “You hit me with a log?” Villanelle shouts indignantly as he escapes, as if insulted by his banal weapon choice.