“Wouldn’t it be funny to watch a woman in her thirties manage herself around a penis for the first time?”

Desiree Akhavan said that was the seed of The Bisexual, a Hulu dramedy dropping November 16 that she co-wrote, directed, and stars in. Akhavan wanted to make a show that explored the humor and pathos of an adult woman, “revirginized and out of her element,” hurled headfirst into the kind of “experiences you have as a teen, where everything’s kind of humiliating.”

Every time a series like Atlanta or Fleabag or Insecure comes along to shatter established television conventions, I find myself sighing with pleasure (how is it possible we’ve never seen this before!), and then sighing with frustration (how is it possible we’ve never seen this before?). What these shows have in common is their unmistakable idiosyncrasy. Akhavan developed her unique slant on things first through a Web series called The Slope, and then through her independent films like 2014’s Appropriate Behaviour and this year’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which features Chloë Grace Moretz as a gay teen plunged into conversion therapy.

Akhavan grew up in New York, a tall, overweight loner whose school nickname was “the Beast.” She began writing plays at the age of nine, but later swapped theater for movies at Smith College after signing up on a whim for a world cinema class. “I fell in love. It was instantly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she said by phone. In her twenties, Akhavan studied filmmaking at New York University, made a short film that was widely rejected by film festivals, developed an eating disorder—and came out as bisexual.

The notion of making a TV show emerged while she was doing publicity for Appropriate Behaviour, in which she plays a bisexual Iranian-American woman who is afraid to come out to her parents. For the first time, Akhavan said, “I was hearing myself described as ‘a bisexual director.’ I didn’t mind that they were calling out my sexuality . . . but there was something about being called a bisexual publicly—even though it’s 100 percent true!—that felt totally humiliating and in bad taste, and I wanted to understand why.”

Rather than restrict herself to the binding structure of a movie, Akhavan craved the flexibility of TV, where she could follow multiple characters and digressive subplots, conjuring a loose world that was funny, sexy, and tonally ambiguous. Her inspirations were shows like Broad City and Louie and The Comeback—in other words, “really funny shows that go too far and are specific to their own world and their own voice.” Girls is another series in that uneasy comedy category, and in fact, Lena Dunham cast Akhavan as a minor character in her show’s fourth season after admiring Appropriate Behaviour. That inevitably led to stories pegging Akhavan as a gay, Iranian Lena Dunham.

Akhavan found that pat comparison not just frustrating but problematic for business reasons. When she first went out to Los Angeles to pitch The Bisexual, TV executives told her, “‘This is so great, but we already have a female-driven show,’ or, ‘We already have our gay show,’” Akhavan recalled. “You wouldn’t want to oversaturate the marketplace with more female voices, more queer voices! That was my first lesson of pitching in Hollywood. . . . It was a rude awakening.”

Akhavan moved to London four years ago and was able to get The Bisexual made there. In the series, she plays Leila, a New Yorker living in East London with her older British girlfriend, Sadie (Maxine Peake), who is also her business partner in a trendy fashion tech start-up. When Sadie proposes, Leila panics and breaks up. “We talked about kids and marriage!” Sadie protests. “We also talked about euthanasia,” Leila retorts. The six-episode season traces Leila’s charmingly awkward stumbles toward pursuing her pleasure. She navigates life with an immature male roommate (Brian Gleeson), struggles to maintain her work relationship with her ex, parties with her queer posse, and experiments with heterosexuality.

“One thing that feels like a big secret is that sex with women is not that different from sex with men!” Akhavan said. The Bisexual depicts sex in intimate, tender, and sometimes messy ways—particularly early on when Akhavan said she was trying to suggest a kind of fumbling teenage experience for the thirtysomething Leila. “I think there are very few honest depictions of female sexuality on the screen, and sexual coming-of-age stories. That was what this became.”

Leila’s carnal adventures also disrupt her social circle. “To me, it was so much more interesting to have a reverse coming-out story, somebody who was ‘betraying’ the lesbian world to sleep with men,” Akhavan said with a mischievous chuckle. But it’s also about a universal frustration with monogamy, homing in on “what it is to love someone for 10 years, and to feel like you’re making compromises, and to hit your thirties and feel like you’re not having sex on your own terms. You don’t want to lock it down and get married and look over your shoulder and wonder what experiences you didn’t have.”

Akhavan wrote the part for herself, feeling it was “disingenuous to make something quite so personal, to put your heart and your politics on the line, and then not put your face there, too.” Leila’s body is on show a fair amount, and though it’s a conventionally attractive one, I wondered what that means for someone who has been through the wringer of eating disorders. “I feel like there should be a variety of bodies on the screen, and, theoretically, I’m very proud to put mine out there,” she said before exhaling loudly. “Personally, it’s . . . tough. It’s really tough. I don’t always love being the person on-screen.” She admits to feeling emotionally overexposed, but said her philosophy in life is “always just fake it till you make it. . . . Theoretically, I should not have shame around it and I should embrace this opportunity that I created for myself. And, theoretically, this is an empowering situation. Then it just kind of becomes that.”

As a director, Akhavan said she told herself, “This is bigger than you. This isn’t about your insecurities with your own skin. This is about making something that doesn’t look like everything else we’ve seen on-screen.” So often male directors frame lesbian sex in a way that feels very objective, as if the camera is “a third person in the room,” and it’s observing “the mechanics of the way these two fuck. It’s really important to me in these scenes that it’s subjective, that you’re in that experience.” A lot of things are communicated during sex, she continued, “and it’s strange to me that most [scenes] just communicate the fact that penetration is happening.”

Unlike Appropriate Behaviour, The Bisexual doesn’t dwell on its heroine’s Iranian-American identity. Akhavan said that she had intended to include scenes about Leila’s family, but they fell by the wayside in favor of a deeper dive into sexuality and friendship. If the series gets picked up for a second season, she hopes to take on questions of race and heritage. Akhavan said she also hopes she’ll get a chance to take on more mainstream projects: “I would really love to have work that makes an impact and doesn’t preach to the choir.” A bisexual superhero, perhaps? “It doesn’t have to be bisexual or Iranian or whatever, [as long as it] comes from the voice of someone who knows what it means to be marginalized.”

When asked if she had any specific things she knew she wanted to portray on television, Akhavan had a one-word answer: queefing (a.k.a. vaginal flatulence), which makes an appearance in the third episode. More seriously, she says she was moved by the sight of Leila and her scene-stealingly deadpan best friend, Deniz (Saskia Chana), driving a van at the start of The Bisexual: “Two nonclassically beautiful Middle Eastern women owning a scene, you know? Not talking about men, not talking about how they were going to get with men . . . just hanging out, driving the van. I didn’t realize it would be so strange until I watched it.”