What’s the deal with straight people? That’s the question I had turning over in my head while watching the first episode of Fleishman Is in Trouble (FX on Hulu, November 17), a mini-series adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s best-selling novel about a divorced guy doing divorced guy stuff. (Or so it initially seems.) In the premiere episode, Jesse Eisenberg’s Toby Fleishman, an early-middle-age doctor whose marriage to theater agent Rachel (Claire Danes) has ended, spends his time on Tinder-like apps, meeting all the horny ladies of Manhattan looking to hook up.

It’s a plethora of sex and ever so slightly dated riffing on the digital age of romance, a sort of awed consideration of already plenty hoary topics. Not being straight myself, I just couldn’t understand what was interesting, new, or particularly titillating about any of it. Maybe watching Eisenberg, who for so long has been frozen in amber as the petulant Harvard geek-villain of The Social Network, tuck into an adult role, bare ass shots and all, will be intriguing to some. And certainly Brodesser-Akner’s book, which she adapted to screen herself, was popular enough to draw people to the series. But otherwise, haven’t we seen this all a million times before?

If that’s your feeling watching the first episode, I’d urge you to stick with the series. Because what lies after that strained bit of sociology is increasingly rich and rewarding. By the end of the seventh and final episode, I found myself quite unexpectedly moved. Not by Toby’s adventures in the carnal world, but by the show’s poignant murmuring on time and regret and self.

The series is narrated by Lizzy Caplan’s character, Libby, an old pal of Toby’s who has found herself in suburban New Jersey, long past her flashier New York City salad days and reflecting on all she’s given up and, maybe, gained. Libby is largely understood to be a stand-in for Brodesser-Akner herself—both worked at high-profile men’s magazines, for example—so it’s no wonder that Fleishman ultimately seems to care more about her than its titular character. And it’s a good thing it does. Caplan is a marvel in the role, both in the scenes she’s physically present for and in her voiceover narration. Perhaps particularly in the latter, which lilts and murmurs in all its poetic observation of the everyday.

Caplan has long been a favorite of people who loved Mean Girls or Party Down, a sardonic girl next door who’s good for a quip and a well-articulated grimace. She’s proven her dramatic mettle before, perhaps most prominently in Showtime’s Masters of Sex, but in many ways she’s a revelation in Fleishman Is in Trouble. Tart, soulful, prickly with hard-won wisdom, Caplan’s performance is the vital anchor of the series. Without her, and without Brodesser-Akner’s graceful writing for her to manipulate so dexterously, Fleishman Is in Trouble would feel a lot less substantial.

Though there is also Danes, who gives Rachel a gripping complexity. Rachel is an ambitious hard-charger, a social climber who aspires to the top of Upper East Side society. Fleishman is obsessed with this milieu (and, to some extent, its suburban counterpart), all the yoga classes and expensive preschools and Hamptons homes that dominate the discourse of the monied New York set. The show is preoccupied with that stuff to a fault, maybe, but Rachel, and Danes’s estimation of her, help give dimension to what could have easily seemed simply crass and disastrously blinkered.

One of the quests of the series is finding out where Rachel has disappeared to after she drops the kids at Toby’s apartment and, supposedly, heads off to an upstate retreat. She’s gone for weeks with no word, while Toby navigates career and children and reconnects with Libby and their friend Seth (Adam Brody, weary and wonderful). The episode that explains where Rachel has been is a terrific showcase for Danes, refracting her past work as addled CIA spook Carrie Mathison on Homeland through a prism of the mundane. It’s in this episode that we really begin to see the expansiveness of Brodesser-Akner’s empathy, when the starchiness of Fleishman’s satire gives way to a big and ragged and disarmingly warm sigh of compassion.

Eisenberg is strong throughout, but he’s given the least to do. Rachel’s journey into the unknown and Libby’s wistful assessment of everything she already knows far outweigh Toby’s nattering about his kids and his job and his faint political convictions. I think that’s the deliberate trick of the series—that as Libby tells Toby’s story she begins to step into her own, just as Brodesser-Akner might have in her writing. But that’s not a meta gimmick that this fascinatingly constructed series trots out proudly as an a-ha surprise. Fleishman Is in Trouble—directed smoothly by the likes of Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, Alice Wu, and Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini—is subtle about its thematic shifts, its quiet mutation from divorce story to grand meditation on the midway point of life.

Yes, it’s all very straight, very rich, very New York, very white. If that limited purview deters people from the series, I wouldn’t blame them. But investing in Fleishman Is in Trouble does eventually yield potent rewards. There is the lark of seeing wealthy people in crisis, yes. There are also the show’s lyrical fugues (near entirely delivered by Caplan), in which the series almost, almost scrapes the underside of HBO’s brilliant Enlightened (still the Mike White show to beat them all).

That series was much more catholic in its forlorn metaphysics, though; its reach extended well past its demographic. Fleishman, in contrast, never strays too far from its privilege parade. Still, I think there is worthy sentiment and insight to be mined here, by a disparate array of potential viewers. Perhaps especially those of us (ahem) who are teetering into 40 and have begun to wonder what shape all of our time in the world has taken. When the series really gets thinking on those matters—of irretrievable youth, of life’s narrowing options—it comes close to profound. Or maybe it’s just Caplan who makes it feel that way, both stoking and soothing all that troubles us.