“Wouldn’t it be funny to watch a woman in her thirties manage herself around a penis for the first time?”

Desiree Akhavan said that was the seed of The Bisexual, a Hulu dramedy dropping November 16 that she co-wrote, directed, and stars in. Akhavan wanted to make a show that explored the humor and pathos of an adult woman, “revirginized and out of her element,” hurled headfirst into the kind of “experiences you have as a teen, where everything’s kind of humiliating.”

Every time a series like Atlanta or Fleabag or Insecure comes along to shatter established television conventions, I find myself sighing with pleasure (how is it possible we’ve never seen this before!), and then sighing with frustration (how is it possible we’ve never seen this before?). What these shows have in common is their unmistakable idiosyncrasy. Akhavan developed her unique slant on things first through a Web series called The Slope, and then through her independent films like 2014’s Appropriate Behaviour and this year’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which features Chloë Grace Moretz as a gay teen plunged into conversion therapy.

Akhavan grew up in New York, a tall, overweight loner whose school nickname was “the Beast.” She began writing plays at the age of nine, but later swapped theater for movies at Smith College after signing up on a whim for a world cinema class. “I fell in love. It was instantly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she said by phone. In her twenties, Akhavan studied filmmaking at New York University, made a short film that was widely rejected by film festivals, developed an eating disorder—and came out as bisexual.

The notion of making a TV show emerged while she was doing publicity for Appropriate Behaviour, in which she plays a bisexual Iranian-American woman who is afraid to come out to her parents. For the first time, Akhavan said, “I was hearing myself described as ‘a bisexual director.’ I didn’t mind that they were calling out my sexuality . . . but there was something about being called a bisexual publicly—even though it’s 100 percent true!—that felt totally humiliating and in bad taste, and I wanted to understand why.”

Rather than restrict herself to the binding structure of a movie, Akhavan craved the flexibility of TV, where she could follow multiple characters and digressive subplots, conjuring a loose world that was funny, sexy, and tonally ambiguous. Her inspirations were shows like Broad City and Louie and The Comeback—in other words, “really funny shows that go too far and are specific to their own world and their own voice.” Girls is another series in that uneasy comedy category, and in fact, Lena Dunham cast Akhavan as a minor character in her show’s fourth season after admiring Appropriate Behaviour. That inevitably led to stories pegging Akhavan as a gay, Iranian Lena Dunham.

Akhavan found that pat comparison not just frustrating but problematic for business reasons. When she first went out to Los Angeles to pitch The Bisexual, TV executives told her, “‘This is so great, but we already have a female-driven show,’ or, ‘We already have our gay show,’” Akhavan recalled. “You wouldn’t want to oversaturate the marketplace with more female voices, more queer voices! That was my first lesson of pitching in Hollywood. . . . It was a rude awakening.”

Akhavan moved to London four years ago and was able to get The Bisexual made there. In the series, she plays Leila, a New Yorker living in East London with her older British girlfriend, Sadie (Maxine Peake), who is also her business partner in a trendy fashion tech start-up. When Sadie proposes, Leila panics and breaks up. “We talked about kids and marriage!” Sadie protests. “We also talked about euthanasia,” Leila retorts. The six-episode season traces Leila’s charmingly awkward stumbles toward pursuing her pleasure. She navigates life with an immature male roommate (Brian Gleeson), struggles to maintain her work relationship with her ex, parties with her queer posse, and experiments with heterosexuality.