Taking life one day at a time seems like good advice for anyone, even recovering alcoholics, but living through each moment is harder than it seems.

Single Drunk Female, newly released on Freeform and available on Hulu, explores those moments, and the helplessness that comes from being at the mercy of a disease that has no cure, only a labor-intensive, never-ending treatment plan.

The show tells the story of 28-year-old Samantha Fink who, after a massive public and criminal breakdown, is forced to move back home with her overbearing mother to sober up and avoid jail time. Sam is a sloppy drunk; her fellow Bzzz (think, Buzzfeed) all know it, and disciplinary action from her boss leads to her assaulting him in his office.

After she is fired and granted probation by the courts, she has to start over by moving back home with Carol, her mother, Ally Sheedy (The Breakfast Club), who suffice to say suffers her presence less than gracefully. Sam almost immediately relapses, falling in with old friend Felicia (Lily Mae Harrington), who doesn’t understand just how badly Sam needs to not drink.

After the two tear up a bar, Sam makes the mistake of getting behind the wheel of a car, and before she even gets out of the parking lot she plows into the bachelorette party bus rented by her former best friend Brit (Sasha Compère), who is about to marry Sam’s ex-boyfriend Joel (Charlie Hall). The incident gets Sam in a world of trouble, both legally and financially, and of course it puts a major roadblock in the way of her relationship with Brit.

Sam must find a new job, and takes whatever she can get, this time at a grocery store. To add to the humiliation, she is working on a probationary basis, earning very little money. And of course, she must attend AA meetings, which is something she really does not wish to do, calling it a cult.

Still, she has to go, and there she meets – or reacquaints herself with – James (Garrick Bernard) – another attendee who she drunkenly hooked up with in her former life. She also gets a sponsor, Olivia (Rebecca Henderson), who resists Sam’s attempts to cast her as a fairy godmother who can solve all her problems. Olivia gives Sam one piece of advice: don’t drink.

There’s a lot of talent associated with Single Drunk Female, and it shows. Writer/creator Simone Finch (The Conners/Roseanne) has written characters that feel very real and relatable; you cheer Sam on even as you cringe at her bad decisions. Black-D’Elia makes for a sympathetic hero: through her eyes we see the difficulty of living through each moment of newfound sobriety: she’s not just surviving one day at a time, it’s one minute at a time, long minutes where she cannot rely upon her usual escape to get by.

The older adults are the real stand-outs here, though. Sheedy seems to be playing the grown-up version of her neurotic Breakfast Club character: brittle, exasperated, and probably in denial about her own reliance on alcohol, her Carol was enjoying her empty nest, trying to move to the next level with boyfriend Bob (Ian Gomez), and passive-aggressively resists having to actively parent her grown child again. Henderson as Sam’s sponsor is another delight; as a sponsor she’s acerbic, no-nonsense, and yet we can see she actively struggles to keep her life together too. Her wife Stephanie (Madeline Wise) balks at all the time Olivia spends with her sponsees, and Olivia is struggling to keep the balance between her responsibilities and her life.

The show never forgets to be a comedy, though it is darkly humorous at times, and a little cringey too, but enjoyable not despite that but because of it. Single Drunk Female is about engaging characters trying to make it through each day, just as we all are.