Outside of Community, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has had perhaps the strangest road to release of any show this season. Schmidt was ordered as a new sitcom for NBC, riding on the network’s history with creator and writer Tina Fey. However, the NBC of today is quite different than the NBC of 2006-2013, when 30 Rock aired. After the end of The Office and 30 Rock, NBC decided to turn away from their comedies, which had always been critical darlings, in hopes of reaching a much broader and ratings-friendly audience with a focus on dramas. Since then, they have cancelled Community and put an end to Parks and Recreation, and the few broader comedies that they have remaining (such as About a Boy, Undateable, and Marry Me) are almost certain to be cancelled after their current seasons.

This left NBC in a bit of a predicament: here they had a very strange show from a creative team whose past work had never garnered huge ratings, and absolutely nowhere to put it on their schedule. So, instead of cancelling Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt pre-air or leaving it to die in a bad timeslot, they agreed to skip the awkward “will this show get picked up somewhere else?” phase and offer it to Netflix. It was a win-win for everybody…at least until NBC decided to launch a comedy series online subscription service last week with no actual comedies to offer. C’est la vie.

All this is to say that, despite its home on Netflix, the first 13-episode season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is technically an NBC comedy. It was produced under the same standards and practices that any other broadcast television show has to abide by, and it certainly has the “house look” of an NBC show. However, it is also very apparent that this show would not have flourished on NBC the way that it might on Netflix. The premise, that a woman is rescued after 15 years in a crazy cultist’s underground bunker and decides to take New York by storm, is incredibly dark by broadcast network standards. Even if the show’s tone and outlook are as positive as they can be, it is clearly a niche show right out of the gate.

First of all, if you’re a fan of 30 Rock, you don’t even need to read the rest of this review for a recommendation. Just go watch it. Kimmy Schmidt is VERY reminiscent of Tina Fey’s previous show, right down to the music, the setting, and the frequency of the jokes. While plenty of care is given over to treating the characters as real (albeit exaggerated) people, the show will do anything for a laugh, even if it means breaking the reality of its own world for a second. It’s a high-concept version of 30 Rock’s joke machine.

For the rest of you, given how subjective humor can be, I can only give you my personal opinion on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: I love it. Each episode has had several laugh-out-loud moments, the characters are enjoyable, there are lots of surprise gags, and I appreciate the show’s dark streak. Most of all, I can’t get enough of Ellie Kemper’s performance. As much as I enjoyed her on The Office, the way she throws herself into the role of Kimmy Schmidt with reckless abandon makes her one of the best leads on any modern comedy show.

Kemper never has a reason to be low-key. She’s either in her default, unabashedly-sunny optimist mode, or she’s freaking out over something seemingly innocent, like somebody covering her eyes and saying “guess who?” or the sound of velcro. She frequently finds unique, unexpected ways to deliver lines that make them far funnier than they would be on the page. Anybody who can make the line “I know you are, but what am I?” into a gut-buster is a serious talent.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is also immensely watchable. Despite not being the kind of person who typically binge-watches shows, my fiancee Reba and I got through the entire first season of Kimmy Schmidt in its first weekend of release. There’s just enough of a serialized hook to keep you watching episode-to-episode, and the show is breezy enough that it never feels like a burden to continue. Despite its original home at NBC, it is a perfect match for Netflix in this regard.

I’m sure that this show is not for everybody, but I’d highly recommend giving it a shot. At the very least, there’s nothing else quite like it, on TV or the internet.