“Looking” treats its highly specific circle of gay men with warmth and playfulness. Illustration by Edwin Fotheringham

In the British director Andrew Haigh’s first movie, “Weekend,” from 2011, two strangers have a one-night stand that promises to last forever. They collide like pool balls, in bars and beds and kitchens, for days. In many ways, the film is a classical indie romance, with two opposites talking themselves into love. There’s even a kiss by train tracks. But, because they’re both men, a stranger wolf-whistles and yells out a slur, and the more guarded of the two finds himself nearly lunging toward the voice. It was a moment that felt at once discreet and defiantly political.

Now Haigh is directing a TV show called “Looking,” for HBO, written by Michael Lannan, and based on Lannan’s short film “Lorimer,” from 2011. Their collaboration is a real beauty, the standout among several smart series launching in January. (Remember when the big TV season started in September? Not anymore.) In contrast to “Weekend,” which was set in a grimy, depressing city in the Midlands, “Looking” takes place in that Emerald City modern San Francisco, where same-sex marriage is legal and older definitions of gay identity—rebel, outsider, artist—have begun to curl with age. With its unglamorous sex scenes, the show will inevitably be compared to “Girls,” but “Looking” has far more in common with Nicole Holofcener’s sweet-and-sour ensembles, or the eighties film “Parting Glances”—unhurried portraits of sprawling social worlds. Some critics will surely find the show insufficiently transgressive, or “slight,” that code word which is often applied to stories about love and dating. But “Looking” is a stealth breakthrough, if only because it treats its highly specific circle of gay men with warmth and playfulness, viewing their struggles as ordinary, not outrageous.

At the show’s center is a youngish man in flux: twenty-nine-year-old Patrick (the pretty-faced Jonathan Groff). A Colorado transplant, Paddy works as a video-game designer. He’s stinging from two bits of news: his ex-boyfriend has got engaged, and his best friend and roommate, Agustín—the excellent Frankie J. Alvarez—is moving in with his own boyfriend, Frank (O. T. Fagbenle). As Paddy tries to kick his life into gear, he stumbles into various humiliating traps: an OkCupid date peppers him with questions, then rejects him as a low-calibre prospect; at a work party, he hits on a man who turns out to be his new boss (Russell Tovey); and he gets truly terrible advice from Agustín, an upper-class Cuban-American, on how white-boy Paddy should prepare for a date with a “cholo.” The result is one of the most gruesome hookups in recent history, and that’s saying something, considering what’s on cable.

The spine of the first four episodes centers on this layered cross-cultural flirtation, and while I don’t want to spoil much more than I have—though relationship-driven shows don’t rely on surprise, they do benefit from it—it’s an attraction that swerves, a few times, in surprising directions. The show is equally strong when it focusses on other characters, including Agustín, an artist who makes no art, and the slightly older Dom, played by the impressively mustached Murray Bartlett. A middle-aged stud, Dom wrecked his financial health years earlier, supporting a meth-addicted ex. Between pickups and Zumba classes, he’s waiting tables. “I’m such a cliché,” he moans to his female roommate, an ex from before he came out. “Thinking that sex will make me feel better. I mean, it does, but still.” When he drifts into contact with a potential business investor—played by the terrific Scott Bakula, who, with “Men of a Certain Age” and “Behind the Candelabra,” has been making a specialty of these sorts of elderly-cocksman roles—it feels like the building of a generational bridge.

The past fifteen years of television have featured plenty of gay-male influence, although you’d hardly know it from the way the era is portrayed in the media, through the lens of Scotch straight up and the Bada Bing. Influential gay male showrunners include Michael Patrick King, of “Sex and the City” and “The Comeback”; Silvio Horta, of the underrated “Ugly Betty”; Alan Ball, of “Six Feet Under” and “True Blood”; and that repeat offender Ryan Murphy, the creator of “Glee” and “American Horror Story.” These men are hardly clones, but they share an aggressive theatricality and a predilection for mythic structures, a quality that also shows up in earlier shows like HBO’s “Oz” (a prison show that pivoted around a gay romance so kinky that it was practically operatic) and Showtime’s “Queer as Folk.” These scripted series share some bloodlines with reality television, which has been queer from the start, starting with “The Real World” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and running through “Project Runway” and the “Real Housewives” series, whose reunion shows are hosted by Andy Cohen, Bravo’s court jester.

“Looking” is a whole different ball of wax. Sneaky-funny instead of brassy, it is interested not in extremity but in small-bore observation. In this way, it shares a sensibility with the charming “Please Like Me,” an Australian series, now airing on Pivot, which people also initially called “the gay ‘Girls.’ ” Both shows feature diffident heroes, young men who regard retro gay culture with a sense of bemused incredulity, like Christopher Isherwood with a Webcam. “Looking” establishes this generational theme in its first scene, in which Paddy goes cruising, very briefly. He gets a truncated hand job—“Cold hands!” he complains—but it’s less a sex act than a prank. “The guy who gave it to me was very hairy,” he marvels to his friends. “Not hipster hairy. Like, gym-teacher hairy.” (The scene reminded me of the old Onion headline “Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation.”)

That mock-cruising moment feels a bit blunt, like a thesis statement: this is not your father’s homosexuality. A few other early elements are similarly on the nose, like a debate about whether one can separate sex and intimacy. But, as the episodes build, “Looking” gets subtler, and also more original, sending out tendrils of intrigue. The camerawork is solid, flickering through the Haight and the Castro, lingering on bistros filled with “tech assholes” and on the raucous Folsom Street Fair, on abdominal tattoos of Dolly Parton’s signature and on steam rooms full of aging hunks. With his Bambi eyes, as gawky as a Jason Segel man-boy, Paddy makes an appealing hero: he’s nerdy, and a little repressed, until he lets loose a dirty giggle. Like the show he’s in, he’s easy to underestimate, but worth the risk.

I’ve made a case in the past for the savvy cream puff that is Showtime’s “Episodes”—one of the few genuine sex farces on cable television, which too often favors pretentious dramedies or dank satires. The first season played out something like “Dangerous Liaisons,” except that a television network was eighteenth-century France, Matt LeBlanc was the seducer Valmont, and the first-rate Tamsin Greig was the woman who despised him but ended up in bed with him anyway. The second season hit a few rough spots, but it still did a nice job of battering the solid marriage of two seemingly sane adults—Beverly and Sean Lincoln (Greig and Stephen Mangan), celebrated British TV producers now grinding out a dirt-dumb version of their hit show in Hollywood.

It seemed doubtful that the show’s creators could keep those plates spinning for another round, but the third season introduces a fantastic new contrivance: a psychotic new network head, played by Chris Diamantopoulos. He’s full of shit, yet insightful about his sick industry. “It’s like everything you gave me arrived pre-cancelled!” he howls at his minions, flexing his six-pack. The cast includes Daisy Haggard, who plays the tiny role of Myra, the “head of comedy,” with one brilliantly sour facial expression; and the amazing Kathleen Rose Perkins, as Carol, the network’s head of programming, her voice toggling from upspeak to Lean-In. “We only have sex in the office,” she tells Beverly of her latest debasing affair. “We’re taking it slow.” Carol is the show’s artificial heart, and, like the business she’s devoted her life to, she has the lowest standards imaginable, although she views them as unreachably aspirational. “There is a huge difference between omitting and lying,” she explains to Beverly—and then blurts out the necessary caveat: “That said, I also believe in lying.” ♦