This Undersung Show Is Back For Its Final Season

The groundbreaking Max comedy series sticks the landing as it wraps up.

Personal growth isn’t often linear. It usually comes in fits and starts.

Over the last few years, it has been great to see a wider range of TV series, especially half-hour comedies, embrace that. From “Insecure” to “Chewing Gum,” and from “Fleabag” to “Russian Doll,” they show their complicated lead characters heading toward more realistic resolutions, rather than something too neat and pat, too tailor made for a TV show.

At times, the “messy protagonist stumbling through life” premise has become a trope. But at their best, these kinds of shows deftly fuse the personal with the big picture. One of the more undersung recent shows that both fits that admittedly loose description, and is also uniquely its own, is “Sort Of,” whose third and final season begins Thursday on Max, after premiering on CBC in Canada last fall.

Each season of the show has followed star and co-creator Bilal Baig as Sabi, a nonbinary Pakistani Canadian in their 20s, navigating adulthood, jobs, family and cultural pressures, friendships and dating. The series has been groundbreaking for its nonbinary representation. Beyond Sabi, many of the show’s supporting characters are also queer. The show beautifully finds the balance between showing a rich tapestry of queer characters, while also allowing each character to be more than their identities and not putting labels on them.

This final season (which Baig and co-creator Fab Filippo have stressed was their decision) follows Sabi in the aftermath of several seismic events, particularly the death of their father at the end of Season 2. They are also starting the process of receiving gender-affirming health care and medically transitioning, figuring out both the physical changes, as well as how to tell the people around them.