Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne‘s Apple TV comedy Platonic might be the funniest, sharpest argument against the idea that men and women can’t really be just friends. It’s also the kind of show that gets better every time you go back to it, which you will. The plot? Fairly basic. Will (Rogen) and Sylvia (Byrne) were best friends in college who had a falling out years ago — specifically, she expressed reservations about his ex-girlfriend. He chose the girlfriend, and the friendship collapsed.

Now they’re in their early 40s, and Will is freshly divorced, co-owns a craft brewery he is enthusiastically steering into a ditch, and has the kind of lifestyle that can charitably be described as “arrested development but make it artisanal.” Sylvia is a former lawyer who left her career to raise three kids and just shipped her youngest off to kindergarten, leaving her staring into the abyss of an unstructured Tuesday with nothing but her own thoughts and a very nice kitchen. They reconnect, and the friendship reignites immediately, with a force that surprises both of them. What follows is a show that’s deeply, sincerely interested in asking: what does it mean when a friendship becomes the most important relationship in your life?

Apple TV’s ‘Platonic’ Expertly Pulls Off an Adult Friendship With No Romance in Sight

The great trick Platonic pulls is refusing to treat its central friendship as a coded romance. Will and Sylvia are not secretly in love with each other. The show is not building to a climax (innuendo intended). It’s creating something much stranger and more honest, dropping inconvenient truths along the way, like, for instance, the realization that you can be jealous of your friend’s other friends. Or that you can feel abandoned when they prioritize their spouse. And even the fact that you can blow up your perfectly fine life because someone who genuinely understands you walked back into it. Season 1 of Platonic watches Sylvia’s husband Charlie (Luke Macfarlane, doing great things in the thankless role of The Reasonable One) try to understand why his wife is suddenly going to dive bars at midnight and getting tattoos with a guy she hasn’t spoken to in years.

The show, which has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, is smart enough to make Charlie sympathetic rather than a villain. (After all, he’s not wrong to question if his wife has finally lost her damn mind.) But it also makes the case that Sylvia’s friendship with Will is filling something real and legitimate that her marriage simply isn’t designed to fill. That’s rare, especially for television. The romantic comedy genre has trained us to see every close male-female friendship as a story waiting to finish itself. Platonic subverts that expectation in fashionable men’s cardigans.

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne Are Doing Some of Their Best Work in Apple TV’s ‘Platonic’

This next argument for why Platonic deserves your time should not be a surprise. Rogen and Byrne made Neighbors together in 2014 and demonstrated an easy, combustible chemistry that most comic duos spend entire careers chasing. But Platonic gives them room that a studio comedy never could. The show was created by Nick Stoller and Francesca Delbanco, and it’s written with the kind of specificity that comes from people who have clearly felt this. This is how middle-aged people self-destruct!

Rogen is doing something more subdued here than his usual on-screen persona suggests. Will is emotionally avoidant, and kind of a mess, but the show treats his avoidance as a wound rather than a punchline. Byrne, meanwhile, is killer. Sylvia is the engine of the show — smart, funny, increasingly reckless, and willing to do things the audience finds uncomfortable. She’s got a lot more to lose than Will when it comes to their meandering, adulthood-skirting adventures, which makes her, somehow, the messier of the two.

‘Platonic’ Season 2 Turns Up the Comedy Dial in Every Way

Season 1 is the best kind of slow-burn character study, but Season 2 somehow raises the stakes: a wedding, a career pivot, a legal crisis, and a plan to open a bar together — the aforementioned Sh*tty Little Bar, which is somehow both a terrible idea and a completely inevitable one. Aidy Bryant joins the cast in Season 2 and is, to put it plainly, a delight. Her character brings a new current of chaos into Sylvia’s orbit and serves as both comic accelerant and an unexpected mirror for where Sylvia is trying to go.

The season is funnier than the first but also emotionally heavier in places, with a few late-episode gut-punches that arrive without warning and land very hard. (There’s a particular subplot with a Jeopardy theme that is ridiculous, devastating, and cringe-inducing all at once.) The show has earned those moments by the time they come, and they set up even more complicated themes for the show’s next installment.

Now’s the Time To Binge ‘Platonic’ Before Season 3 Hits Apple TV

Apple TV confirmed Season 3, which is the streaming equivalent of a standing ovation given streaming’s complicated relationship with renewal decisions. The best argument for catching up now before Season 3 arrives is that this show rewards attention. By its Season 1 finale, you’ll understand why everyone who has seen it cannot stop recommending it at a volume and frequency that borders on aggressive.

Will and Sylvia are not a love story, but they are a story about two people who make each other worse and better simultaneously. That turns out to be a more interesting subject, and the fact that it’s also this funny is, frankly, almost unfair to every other comedy on streaming right now.