As a general rule, I find it easy to want to like Zillennial hangout comedies, even when I initially do not. Having once been 20something and incredibly annoying about it myself, I’m inclined to give my younger self’s TV counterparts the benefit of the doubt for their abrasive edges or bratty posturing. Sometimes, my patience even pays off: FX’s Adults, following an uneven first season, just recently returned for a sublimely hilarious second, allowing me the smug pride of a parent who knew their kid had it in ’em all along.

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Per those criteria, the new Netflix show Dang! is another I’m primed to want to like: Created by Andrew Law (a veteran of Hacks, The Good Place and many other very funny things), the animated comedy follows a trio of siblings in New York who are all fuck-ups in their own way. But while the show has its occasional moments of cuteness or cleverness, and only rare ones of active tedium, I found its eight half-hours more frequently felt like a show I wanted to laugh at more than I actually did.

In addition to its familial bent, Dang! happens to be something of a rarity as a show created by and centering on Asian Americans — and one that, thankfully, mostly ignores the usual tiger-mom, assimilation-blues clichés. Instead, its central duo define themselves by their utter and unapologetic uselessness.

Andrew (Law) is a tech guy, sort of, having secured a make-work job at a Depop-like startup mainly by being the founder’s college roommate. Mostly, his concerns are getting laid, avoiding any actual work and taking care of his baby sister. That would be Eunice (Poppy Liu), unpaid intern at a Goop-like enterprise and occasionally paid OnlyFans streamer whose gimmick is stepping on bread with her bare feet. She is narcissistic where Andrew is hopelessly neurotic, and only too pleased to let her big brother do all the cooking and cleaning and bill-paying and even burping her from time to time.

Eunice and Andrew are the best of friends, so in sync that they can carry out entire conversations (“Have you seen my battery pack?” “I put it in your room, it’s charging your vibrator as we speak”) in grunts and hums. Their favorite shared activities include doing drugs, marathoning reality TV and avoiding spending time with their big sister, Ruthie (Stephanie Hsu), a hotshot corporate lawyer who barely bothers to disguise her disdain for their feckless lifestyles.

But when Ruthie blows up her own life over an extramarital affair with a colleague (SungWon Cho), she moves from San Francisco to New York to start semi-fresh and, horror of horrors, to try and reconnect with them. Dang! chronicles the mostly very silly, occasionally kinda moving dynamic among the trio, which it neatly sums up as conforming to “the three Bs of birth order: The oldest is the bully, the youngest is the baby, and the middle child is the little bitch.”

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The show has a few things going for it. One is that the animation by Titmouse is very pleasant to look at, with soft shapes, clean lines and occasionally cutesy facial expressions that evoke Miyazaki as much as they do, say, Tuca & Bertie. Another is its tone, slightly sweet but mostly irreverent. Dang! doesn’t pretend its characters are not terrible people — Ruthie is a cold-blooded capitalist, Andrew a toxic combination of passive-aggressive and pushover, Eunice simply a brat. But it also understands their love for one another as sincere, if imperfect. They’ll promise to be there for each other and mean it; they’ll also sigh, “Oh, thank God. For a second I thought we’d have to be there for you,” when the offer turns out to be unnecessary.

When its obvious affection for its characters is filtered through scenarios specific enough to feel fresh, Dang! can be a minor delight. One of my favorite gags of the season was a spot-on parody of suspiciously horny Christian praise songs: “Come inside of me, come and fill me up,” goes one from Andrew’s churchy high school days, “come inside me when I’m open wide.” The added joke that Andrew can’t tell if it’s just bad, or bad “in the way that gay guys like things that are terrible,” is the perfect extra button. All of it feels like the product of a writer (or writers) who’s spent inordinate amounts of time in Protestant youth groups and trendy gay nightclubs.

For the most part, though, Dang! is undermined by a shortage of innovation — as with its caricatures, in Andrew and Eunice’s bosses, of grindset-hustlebro and wellness-empress types that would have felt novel five years ago — and a lack of precision. A tossed-off line like “Last week, I saw Omarosa as Velma Kelly in Chicago. She took a phone call during ‘All That Jazz’ and we gave her a standing ovation” is fine enough, I guess, as an illustration of how disappointing New York can be. But the name-drop comes off as random rather than pointed; you can only imagine how much more cutting a Hacks or The Other Two version of the joke would have been.

A first-draft feel is hardly the end of the world for a new show still finding its voice. And it seems a promising sign that one of the strongest episodes is its finale, a trip to the siblings’ hometown that combines broad humor (like the increasingly thick Boston accents that Andrew and Eunice slide into) with just a dash of real character growth. One can only hope Dang!, too, is able to grow up just a little bit, into a more confident and distinctive version of itself.

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