Into every generation, a hangout sitcom is born — light on plot, and heavy on the chemistry of a group of young adults spending way too much time together in the big city. Gen X had Friends. The millennials had too many to count, including New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, and Happy Endings. Gen Z hasn’t quite had its own moment yet, in part because most show creators are at least in their thirties, in part because the TV business assumes that most of Gen Z is getting their video on nontraditional platforms. (Maybe there’s a Gen Z equivalent of Happy Endings appearing in quick bites on TikTok?) There have been a few recent college sitcoms created by millennials, including The Sex Lives of College Girls and Overcompensating, but the territory is mostly wide open to be explored, especially by writers who aren’t that much older than the characters they create.

The new FX/Hulu comedy Adults will have a hard time becoming a generational touchstone, if only because everyone consumes media in so many different ways today. But it’s a promising addition to the legacy, written by and about twentysomethings, full of silliness and friendly vibes in equal measure.

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Created by Tonight Show writers Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, who were 27 when they sold it to FX, Adults follows a group of friends who are all spending their post-college years living in the Queens childhood home of Samir (Malik Elassal), whose parents are off on a seemingly never-ending world tour. Samir grew up with Billie (Lucy Freyer), and went to college with Issa (Amita Rao) and Anton (Owen Thiele, who’s also in Overcompensating). Relatively new to the group is Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa’s easygoing boyfriend and someone who is — like Will Tippin on Alias, Colin Robinson on What We Do in the Shadows, and Jordan Catalano on My So-Called Life — only ever referred to by his full name.

Adults wastes no time getting its tone across, with an opening scene where Issa decides the best way to combat a subway masturbator is to loudly gratify herself at the same time, not noticing or caring that everyone else in the car is now filming her — and that the pervert she’s trying to shame is aroused by her stunt. The series is loaded with stories where the quintet takes the worst possible approach to solving a problem, while also having no real interest in privacy or decorum.

When Issa learns that an outer-circle friend may have been molested, she grabs her phone and does talk-to-text dictation: “Kyle, comma, molested, question mark?” In another episode, she finds herself in a hospital chapel while Billie is getting a procedure and vents to a “nondenominational god” about the fact that Paul Baker seems capable of having fun without her. She’s having the worst day, she laments, “and I know that sounds cringe, because there are cancer kids here.”

Issa is the most narcissistic, least self-aware of the group, but they’re all in their own bubbles to varying degrees. In the season’s third episode, the housemates are both shocked and not shocked that Anton has become friendly with local menace “the Bayside Stabber” because he has a tendency to be “a friend slut,” acting intensely interested in total strangers, swapping a few texts with them, then forgetting they exist. (He has 4,000 unread texts in his phone.) In a subplot, Paul Baker and Samir visit a pawn shop to try to sell a gun Samir doesn’t want in the house, but Paul Baker struggles to talk to the owner, who seems progressive in his actions and beliefs, and completely retrograde in his language. (After the man non-judgmentally uses an old slur to describe a developmentally disabled sister he clearly loves, Paul Baker tells him that nobody uses that word anymore: “The cast of Glee kinda did that through the power of song.”)

That episode is the high point of the six-episode debut season, an impressive blend of farce, social satire, and character comedy, and an excellent spotlight on what all five actors do well. Other installments are more hit-or-miss, particularly in their use of cringe comedy. The fifth episode, where Billie makes an ass of herself in front of the friends of her much older boyfriend (played by Daredevil himself, Charlie Cox), while Samir tanks a job interview, is so uncomfortable that I pondered several times whether I had the intestinal fortitude to finish it.

Mostly, though, the chemistry among the leads, and the sense of extreme, detailed intimacy the writers give the characters, makes it all work. The second episode begins with Billie on the toilet, as the other housemates walk in on her one by one, all of them not only comfortable being in the room while she’s there, but asking whether she’s peeing or pooping. (They also have Billie’s menstrual cycle committed to memory.) Another episode establishes that the group periodically gathers to assign unilateral rules to one another, like Issa ordering Billie to stop going back to her old high school whenever she feels sad. (Given that Cox is her former English teacher, this clearly doesn’t work.)

No good comes from a comedy trying to declare itself a standard-bearer for its entire generation. (When the first episode of Girls had Hannah wonder if she was “a voice of a generation,” many viewers assumed they were meant to take this as a statement by Lena Dunham, rather than a sign of Hannah’s self-delusions.) Fortunately, Adults doesn’t try. There are occasional references to the characters’ age bracket and how older generations feel about them — Bille thinks everyone believes “we’re neurotic, irresponsible, directionless, [and] that we lie about using menstrual cups” — but not so much that it feels like the intended point of Adults. All it wants to be about is five funny people being funny together.

“Always thought the world was gonna be waiting for me,” laments Samir at one point, “and instead, everyone’s annoyed that I’m here.” Anyone who watches this show (all at once on Hulu or weekly on FX) will be much more amused than annoyed.

The first two episodes of Adults debut May 28 on FX, with later episodes releasing weekly. All eight episodes begin streaming May 29 on Hulu. I’ve seen the first six episodes.

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