With Hollywood’s big awards season launching into full swing, January tends to be a month all about the movies – especially for people whose job it is to see them all and write about them. It’s a pleasure, of course, if you love cinema; but let’s face it, most of the award-hopeful films getting the spotlight as the new year turns tend to be pretty serious stuff. Everybody needs a break from that, once in a while.

That’s why we’re happy to take a brief pause from the whirlwind of “prestige cinema” to take a look at something that doesn’t feel quite so heavy, and the fact that it’s available in small doses on your screen-of-choice at home – via queer streaming service OutTV – makes it even more appealing. Oh, and it’s also sexy, which doesn’t hurt.

Cut from a similar cloth as some of the edgier “wacky sitcoms” enjoyed by Gen X-ers and Millennials in their younger years – but with a spicier, more diverse flavor to bridge the three-decade gap in our cultural evolution and infuse things with a more Gen-Z-friendly perspective – and assembled as a long-form narrative told in short (about 10 minutes) installments, “Open To It” is the creation of writer/actor/director Frank Arthur Smith. He stars as Greg, a previously repressed gay man now living the dream in West Hollywood as half of a loving, committed relationship with his partner, Cam (Tim Wardell). Though Cam (a self-proclaimed “former slut”) is happy to have settled into comfortable monogamy, Greg is curious to explore the more free-wheeling sexual lifestyle he denied himself in the past. The solution, of course, is for the couple to experiment with the possibility of opening up their relationship, which is where we meet them as the first episode starts: anxiously awaiting the arrival of Princeton (Jason Caceres), a sexy twink they met on Grindr and invited to join them for their first-ever threesome.

Since we already mentioned the word “wacky,” it’s probably not too hard to guess that things don’t go quite as smoothly as planned. Instead of a hot, steamy evening of pushing their sexual boundaries, the two experience a farcical disaster that, for most of us, might be considered a worst-case scenario. That, of course, establishes a formula that more or less repeats in each successive episode, as the show’s plucky lead couple determinedly keeps trying to expand into the brave new world of polyamory despite one hilariously awkward sexual debacle after another, complicated even further by the persistent Princeton, who wants more in spite of the less-than-ideal circumstances of their first encounter, and the well-meaning but intrusive couple next door (Elsa Aranda and Reggie Thomas as, respectively, a bisexual wild-child and her prudish lesbian partner), whose efforts to be supportive somehow all seem to have the opposite result. Add to this mix Cam’s overprotective Drag Mother (Laganja Estranja), and you have a recipe for queer comedy of the most chaotic kind.

Beginning its life on the film festival circuit, where the first few episodes made the rounds and became an audience favorite, “Open To It” racked up millions of online views, prompting OutTV to pick it up as a series — and affording Smith and his crew the budget to complete the rest of the season. With that in mind, it’s not a surprise that the opening handful of episodes are a little rough around the edges, though it doesn’t take long before you see the actors gaining confidence and relaxing into a natural rhythm. Even in their clunkiest moments, though, these early chapters manage to convey the blend of over-the-top (and definitely NSFW) absurd humor and cheerfully unfettered sex-positivity the show is going for with its comedy-of-errors storyline, and that’s enough to make us want more, and watching both the players and the characters they portray develop helps the second half of the season blossom further into itself.

In the show’s press material, Smith says his idea for the series came from his weariness over shows about queer life with “self-sabotaging protagonists” and “a downtrodden tone,” which often tended to take something of a judgmental tone about “polyamorous or otherwise non-monogamous relationships.”

“I wanted to make a sex- and relationship-positive show that normalized gay JOY,” he says. “Sexy swingers, monogamous married couples, people having a ‘50 Shades of Grey’ tie-up night — all are welcome and celebrated in the world of ‘Open To It.’”

Whether or not the series succeeds in “normalizing” anything, it certainly makes a determined effort to depict it. It’s a show about sex, centering on characters exploring their sex lives, and it’s not afraid to take us as far as broadcast standards will allow. That boils down to LOTS of sex scenes, some of them looking almost as if they could be judiciously-cropped excerpts from somebody’s OnlyFans content, which might seem more gratuitous than they are if everything else in the show felt like an excuse to show lots of sex – but, perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t.

While the show (and its main characters, for the most part) may seem fixated on sex, its progression leads inevitably to an exploration not just of the mores and manners of a polyamorous world, but of navigating a relationship through it. And while things may seem drawn in broad, cartoonish strokes in the first episodes which have dropped since the show’s OutTV premiere on January 2, developments as the season progresses turn characters that might seem at first like stereotyped caricatures into more complex, unexpected, and refreshingly open-minded individuals, all learning – or maybe, making up – the rules as they go along.

It’s that willingness to go deeper — all while keeping things light and as near to ridiculous as possible without becoming pure anarchy — that ultimately helps “Open To It” pay off. To be sure, the writing, especially early on, sometimes borders on the clunky and contrived, more nervous exposition than tone-setting introduction, and the tropes it embraces (more in fun than as reinforcement) about queer “types” and relationships might occasionally be off-putting to viewers looking for a more nuanced approach. Yet in the end, and in surprising ways, the show finds a way forward that promises to expand each of its queer “stock” characters — the repressed gay child acting out sexually as an adult, the too-good-to-be-true sexy-but-smart boyfriend, the tough-loving and “tea”-spilling drag queen, the opposites-attract cliché of the lesbian couple next door — into more fully fleshed-out, complex individuals.

With three more episodes in post-production, and “much more to come,” according to Smith, it appears we’ll have a chance to watch that process continue. And while it may not be the kind of slick-and-polished fare that bigger-budget streaming services use to attract queer viewers, there’s something about its raw-and-unvarnished quality that makes it feel a lot more sincere than most of them — even it doesn’t make the cut when the next “awards season” rolls around.