Near the beginning of the first episode of The Girlfriend Experience, a beguiling American drama that's easily one of the finest new series of 2016, the show's lead character, Chicago law student Christine Reade (Riley Keough), picks up a young man in a bar. At his house, the pair already half-undressed, she tells him, "I want you to watch me" and sits on a chair opposite the bed, where she begins to masturbate.

It's a moment that the show subsequently reveals to be typical as it unfolds over 13 episodes: unexpected and calmly sexual, focused on the question of what constitutes pleasure, and fascinated by the act of being watched and even studied. Christine, who soon begins a parallel career as a high-end escort, upends easy expectations, developing as a kind of anti-hero who knows that she's operating in a world where she's forever to be judged and abbreviated.

Riley Keough plays law student and call-girl Christine in The Girlfriend Experience.

Her fellow student and friend, Avery (Kate Lyn Sheil), who introduces Christine to wealthy clients who pay by what is euphemistically referred to as a gift, tells her that as an escort, "you can be whoever you want to be," and that, as much as the chance to pay her rent, attracts the young woman. Identity, in The Girlfriend Experience, is muted and unknowing. Christine could have 100 layers, or as she sometimes fears, none.

The show was "suggested by" the 2009 Steven Soderbergh film of the same name about an unfulfilled escort, and while Soderbergh is an executive producer, it's plainly the compelling vision of independent filmmakers Amy Seimetz (Sun Don't Shine) and Lodge Kerrigan (Keane), who co-wrote every episode and divided the directing duties.