Abby McEnany’s new comedy series Work in Progress (Showtime) and Hannah Gadsby’s recent standup specials Nanette and Douglas (Netflix) evoke “butch middlebrow,” a contemporary aesthetic and affective sensibility distinguished by the cozy reception it enjoys among straight, white, liberal viewers and critics. McEnany’s and Gadsby’s works have occasioned praise from cosmopolitan gatekeepers like the New York Times and the New Yorker for their self-aware brands of comedy rooted in unvarnished portrayals of butch trauma. Critics ritually insist on the implausibility of Gadsby’s and McEnany’s success, but the popularity of these queer creators’ offerings is not as unlikely as so often presumed. Indeed, the middlebrow butch’s alleged improbability does not render her cultural accolades improbable; it may even ensure them, allowing a new canon of butch respectability to emerge in the light shed by the beacons of aspirational culture.

Russian Doll is a show about two people who are “dying all the time” in every sense of the phrase. As co-protagonists Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) and Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett) each fight grueling emotional battles, they also literally die, expiring and respawning over and over again like characters in a videogame. When Nadia and Alan meet and discover that they're dying at the same time, they become uneasy partners in trying to game the loop that dominates their lives—or rather their deaths. In foregrounding the interracial, (mostly) platonic, queer-tinged connection that results from entrapping two survivors of distinct historical and psychological traumas in a recursive loop, Russian Doll evokes what José Muñoz called “brown feeling”—an affectively and politically depressive position that holds a transformative potential. It is, in fact, Russian Doll 's enactment of the depressive position that makes the show so uplifting despite its devastating subject matter.