Justin Simien’s Dear White People is idiosyncratic in many ways, but chief among them may be how the show-runner uses the fourth wall—and how often. Almost every character gets a moment to directly face the camera; almost every episode concludes with a protagonist facing the viewer. Sometimes the formula is tweaked, but if anything, that underscores what it means to have someone stare into the lens—facing an audience, facing the future, facing the metaphorical music. It’s a directness that suits the show’s stylized, heightened, hyper-realism, which presents a world so self-conscious that it comes as no surprise its characters are fully aware of being watched. Narrator Giancarlo Esposito exhorts us to “watch closely,” in Season 2, as if Dear White People is both a comedy and a series of clues. At times, it feels less that he is encouraging the viewer to watch closely than he is advising the characters to watch us.

But unlike other TV comedies that break the fourth wall primarily to accentuate punch lines, Simien’s use of the fourth wall usually undermines his show’s humor. These character don’t confront the viewer to surprise them with self-aware mockery. Instead, it’s a deeper, rawer, more painful form of address, a hybrid of the way both Spike Lee and Wes Anderson’s protagonists approach the camera—an acute self-awareness combined with a searching, behind the lens, for the sympathy of an unseen, anonymous viewer.

For Simien’s Dear White People, this seeking is acutely relevant. The comedy, whose second season debuts May 4 on Netflix, tells the story of black undergrads at a fictional Ivy League institution called Winchester University. (It’s distinctly a Harvard-Yale-Princeton sort of school, thanks to what protagonist Sam (Logan Browning) describes late in the season as “Harry Potter shit.”) The first season introduced us to a cast of characters living various versions of contemporary blackness, and all stymied by social expectations for that identity—whether those expectations come from their white peers, their black peers, or their own conception of what success as a black person is supposed to feel like.

Cloistered in the ivory tower—and suffocated by it—the show’s leads are exceptional, isolated, and bursting with passion, which pours out from them in implausibly effortless quippy banter, so ridiculous it’s Sorkin-esque. But Dear White People’s characters are so charming, so endearing, that it’s a joy to sit back and watch them dazzle each other. The show itself is dazzling, too, with razor-sharp editing, gorgeous lighting and production design, and a self-conscious camera that gazes at the cast with barely suppressed love. In a late-season episode, Simien films nearly an entire argument in just a single take, with a directing bravura that rivals our most prestigious dramas.

Sam, a brilliant and charismatic radio host, is stymied by her own self-loathing. Her roommate and best friend Joelle (Ashley Blaine Featherston) is constantly relegated to second fiddle, both because it’s hard to shine next to Sam and because being darker-skinned pigeonholes her in a way that most of her peers can barely acknowledge. As the first season depicted, Joelle is into Reggie (Marque Richardson), a fierce activist with a soul rooted in the 70s. Reggie is into Sam. Sam’s former best friend, Coco (Antoinette Robertson), used to date Troy (Brandon P. Bell), who used to be into Sam. And in a romance that became the anchor of the first season, Sam’s into her film-studies T.A., Gabe (John Patrick Amedori), who is, to her chagrin, a white man.