Since it launched in mid-September, The Drew Barrymore Show has taken us for a ride. Not the disingenuous sort, but the chaotic, breakneck kind. One moment, we’re watching Barrymore and Gwyneth Paltrow riff about alternate, daytime TV-appropriate words for vagina (“personal pan pizza”); the next, we’re watching our host openly cry about how she may never recover from her divorce from Will Kopelman. It’s a master class in emotional whiplash, and some of the most fascinating daytime viewing around.

To be fair, she warned us. In the first episode, Barrymore addressed her audience head on: “You think you know me…and you do! I am exactly who you think I am.” She promised she would put “all aspects of life” into her nationally syndicated show. Reader, she meant it—and the result is an often kookadoodle (her word) spectacle with an unusual amount of rawness.

In the first handful of episodes, Barrymore, dressed like a hybrid of 1970s Diane Keaton and Shiv from Succession, featured Billy Porter singing to a flower. She nearly teared up when thanking her two daughters. She pondered the promiscuity of a 62-year-old python with a level of off-the-cuff goofiness unmatched by anything in recent memory. She interviewed new American Girl Doll Courtney in Valley Girl-speak for the “Drews News” segment, and engaged in a mutual gush-fest with her Charlie’s Angels costars Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz.

She cooks; she interior designs; she feels. She talks in hashtags, and casually drops quotes from Gayle King, Patti Smith, and e.e. cummings. She is, it seems, genuinely in awe of everyone and everything, a self-described “human scrapbook of news,” a “pop culture junkie,” a lover of people and stain removal. She has “abused this carcass” to no end, she says at one point, referring to her well-documented addiction problems. Her weight, Barrymore tells us, has always fluctuated within 20 to 30 pounds, and she just wants to find a balance. She is still obsessed with Marie Kondo, and would very much like guidance on how to fold her granny panties.

Reviews have called the show everything from absurdist theater to an emotional rollercoaster. They’re not wrong. And though they’re largely in agreement that Barrymore’s concoction is a welcome departure from expectation, some opine that it’s all a bit too much. Viewers have suggested that Barrymore is putting us on, that she can’t really be this frantic, this animated, this over the top. Can she?

She can. Idiosyncratic sincerity dialed to 11 has been Barrymore’s personality all along, from television interviews of yore—given alone and with her mother, Jaid Barrymore—to the final scene of the 2004 documentary My Date With Drew, where a goofy semi-stalker tracks Barrymore down. Spoiler: He eventually gets to meet her, and she’s the exact same person you see on this show, mannerisms and all.

There’s no getting around the fact that Barrymore’s quirks have their origins in her rough beginnings as a child star, ’90s It Girl, and tragic Hollywood royalty. She may be a relentlessly sunny kook, but she’s one who survived taking her first drink at 9, being addicted to cocaine at 11, and going to rehab at 14. She became emancipated from her parents as a teen; then, when most child stars would have self-destructed, she turned it around. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who’s lived a life like Barrymore’s not sounding like, well, a bit of a lost soul in search of coordinates. So as we say in the South, Barrymore comes by it honestly.

And that is the heart of The Drew Barrymore Show—its host’s massive, yearning, almost childlike empathy, and her emphasis on evolution. Between the goofs, Barrymore is connecting, praising, and giving. Her guest list is also diverse. She features the Ebony Anglers, an all black, female competitive fishing team. She features Judaline Cassidy, a black female plumber who started a nonprofit, Tools and Tiaras, to encourage women to enter the trades.

There are moments of real vulnerability, such as when she welcomes a black woman who is struggling to accept her baldness. But rather than white-womaning her way through someone else’s pain, Barrymore asks Queer Eye’s Karamo Brown to step in and guide the woman to acceptance. When Barrymore tells Henry Winkler how much it meant to her that he was nice to her when she was a child, it doesn’t feel like a schmooze. And when she discusses how wretched it was to divorce Kopelman, you feel her shame. This is authenticity—the sort that daytime’s more polished, scripted products can only dream of.

If there’s a drawback to mixing quirk with soul-searching, it’s that such juxtapositions don’t always make for comfortable bedfellows. The show can feel much like SNL’s recent spoof of it, with its surreal segments, non sequiturs, and loose comedic bits.

Yet that’s what makes The Drew Barrymore Show so remarkable— that something so offbeat is happening on daytime at all. Barrymore feels like the heir apparent to Tyra Banks, whose own show ran for five years and once engaged audiences in a segment called “Burp Off.” Barrymore also has enough star power to command a respectable guest list—and while she’s as famous as her celebrity visitors, seeing them next to each other reminds us how she differs from them. She may be pals with the founder of GOOP, but her own cosmetics line, Flower, sells at CVS. She may be as beautiful as Jessica Alba, but her personal struggles suggest she’s less of a manicured wellness guru, and more of a woman still flummoxed by how to fold granny panties.

Barrymore doesn’t have it all figured out. The Drew Barrymore Show doesn’t either. This is what trying to figure out a life and a TV show in real time looks like. And that’s precisely the sort of reality we could use more of these days, even—or especially—when it goes kookadoodle-doo.

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