Unlike Kate, Tully would be lying—she’s really a slow-smile-“family” type deep down. But she’d also be correct. This writer, on the other hand, would beg to add an adjective. “Firefly Lane,” an adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s novel of the same name, is bullshit. But it’s watchable bullshit. In fact, if I might add another word, it’s eminently watchable bullshit. Full of contradictions, structured with all the soundness of a Jenga tower but anchored by two good (one of them very, very good) performances, it’s the kind of series made for Netflix’s autoplay feature. Watch one episode, roll your eyes, grimace, and settle in for another; emerge 10 hours later, blinking and baffled into the light of a new day.

Should that fate befall you, you’ll have Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke to thank. The unlikely friendship of Kate (Chalke) and Tully (Heigl) defines the series, from the day Tully and her mother Cloud (Beau Garrett) move in next door to Kate and her seemingly perfect, genuinely loving family, to the final, baffling moments of the season finale. (As teens, Kate and Tully are endearingly played by Roan Curtis and Ali Skovbye.) As children, they build an unshakeable bond, one that carries them through college, then their early days in ‘80s television news, and on through Tully’s rise to near-Oprah-level daytime stardom and Kate’s journey through motherhood. Through the decades—get ready for a lot of vaseline on the camera’s lens when Heigl and Chalke navigate the pair’s 20s—they cherish, nurture, and protect each other; wounds are sustained, but nearly always unwittingly inflicted. Their hot producer (Ben Lawson of “Designated Survivor”) can’t part them. The gap between their relative levels of hotness (we’re meant to believe that Chalke is the mousy one, hence the glasses) can’t part them. Tully getting birth control pills for Kate’s 14-year-old daughter (the promising Yael Yurman) without Kate’s knowledge or consent can’t part them.

Yet something eventually does. If you’re humming “Wind Beneath My Wings” under your breath right now, you’re onto something; the novel has garnered no small number of comparisons to “Beaches,” and the show seems likely to do the same. Yet an equal influence on showrunner Maggie Friedman seems to be NBC’s “This Is Us”—think of it as “This Is Beaches,” and you’ve got a good idea of the show’s appeal. Jumping through decades with startling and often disorienting frequency, the series doles out its plot in an a-linear manner intended to engender a sense of mystery, though it never hits on question as potent as “How did Jack Pearson die?” (“This Is Us” viewers who know the importance of a kitchen appliance in the answer to that question will understand that comparison to be even more damning than it suggests.)

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