Ms. Notaro is no polemicist, but in the second season, she has married her deadpan sensibility to a work that expresses a strong point of view on sexual assault: The justice system is stacked against victims, and our culture more broadly has become too blasé about widespread harassment. The feat of the show is the effortless way it blends the dark and the light, persuading you that narratives with comedy and tragedy side by side are the best reflection of the real world.

Ms. Notaro, who plays a character named Tig, is often at odds with her love interest, Kate (her real-life wife, Stephanie Allynne), on how to think about sexual misconduct. After Kate’s experience with the radio programmer, she recalls, with mild disapproval, the inappropriate behavior of a coach in her high school days, and Ms. Notaro corrects her: “By the way, you were molested.” Kate disagrees: “But that happens to me all the time.”

The show is most pointed when the two women try to find redress for the behavior of the radio programmer, Jack (Timm Sharp). In an echo of the way Louis C.K. championed Ms. Notaro after her seminal confessional set with its famous opening joke — “Hello. Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you?” — the programmer tells Tig that he became obsessed with her work when she began doing “deeper, darker more personal material.”

But when she confronts him about masturbating, Jack denies any transgression, and when Kate and Tig approach his boss, they find him sympathetic but ineffectual. “One Mississippi” focuses on the trauma of being a victim, reflected in the way the masturbation scene is shot, shifting to a close-up of Kate’s anguished face as Jack becomes a blur. “We wanted to show that you can be assaulted without even being touched,” Ms. Notaro told The Hollywood Reporter.

This scene provides a contrast to a stunning episode of “Girls” last season, a portrait of sexual assault by a powerful man. After Hannah (Lena Dunham) writes about a novelist’s sexual encounters with young women, the novelist, a divorced father played by Matthew Rhys, invites her to his apartment. He is seductive and argumentative and Hannah has already written about him, so their dynamic is complex and shifting.