I always give a new comedy the benefit of the doubt, or at least the benefit of watching multiple episodes before I decide if I’m going to finish the first season. Of course, there are the unicorn pilot episodes of comedy perfection that cement a show as a must-watch before the first half hour is over.

Think Rachel walking into Central Perk in her wedding dress in “Friends,” Janine meeting Gregory after his encounter with Reversy Toilet in “Abbott Elementary,” and Cam reenacting “The Lion King” to introduce Baby Lily to Mitchell’s family in “Modern Family.” These comedies with excellent pilots have funny and memorable first episodes that set up a show’s premise, reveal the show’s major characters and capture the show’s tone perfectly.

However, largely, comedy pilots, like the first episodes of most shows, may be engaging enough for you to let the next episode autoplay but not stellar enough to convince you to watch the rest of the episodes in the season. This is especially true now, as streaming has become so oversaturated that it’s easy to find something else new and buzzy (or trending on TikTok) to watch instead.

“Running Point,” Netflix’s new half-hour comedy from Mindy Kaling, Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen, falls into this second category; its beginning is uneven, but the season as a whole makes up for it if you stick with it. While the pilot is promising because the premise is interesting, and Kate Hudson is pitch-perfect for the lead role, it’s not a stand-out premiere. The series launched on Netflix on Thursday.

The show begins when Isla Gordon (Kate Hudson) steps in to run the fictional basketball franchise, the Los Angeles Waves, when her oldest brother, Cameron (Justin Theroux), must step down as president to attend rehab.

In Cameron’s stead, Isla must work with (and mitigate) her other brothers, Ness (Scott MacArthur), the general manager, and Sandy (Drew Tarver), the chief financial officer, to try and turn around the losing team. She refuses to write off the season as a “rebuilding year.” Instead, her goal is for the Waves to have a shot at the playoffs and a chance to regain their former glory.

In this pursuit, she must also find a way to earn the respect of the players and manage them through their own interpersonal dramas. For support in her efforts, Isla relies on her best friend and chief of staff, Ali Lee (Brenda Song), and fiancé, Lev Levy (Max Greenfield). She also has a delightful and tension-filled relationship with the Waves coach, Jay Brown (Jay Ellis). After all, could it be a Kaling comedy without the hint of a love triangle?

On its surface, the underdog and sports angles are reminiscent of “Ted Lasso” (another rare comedy with a golden pilot episode). But “Running Point” is neither as family friendly nor as inspirational. Also, unlike “Ted Lasso,” which was intended for a broader audience, “Running Point” feels particularly millennial, like Netflix’s fall hit “Nobody Wants This.”

There’s the excitement of seeing Song on another television show about siblings (she played London Tipton in Disney’s “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody”). Then there’s the you-had-to-have-seen-it-back-then-to-get-it jokes (there’s a perfect one about “Degrassi: The Next Generation”) and a cast with some millennial gems like Greenfield (he starred as Schmidt in “New Girl”).

This also makes the 10 half-hour episodes of “Running Point” a fitting addition to Kaling’s recent catalog. Max’s college show “The Sex Lives of College Girls” and Netflix’s family-friendly teen show “Never Have I Ever” have Gen Z protagonists. It’s time for us millennials — for the original fans of “The Mindy Project” and “The Office” — to get a show that is more intended for us. And that’s exactly what “Running Point” feels like. It’s for the viewers who have loved the combination of Hudson and basketball since she cheered for the Knicks while forcing “Benny” (Matthew McConaughey) to fetch her a Diet Coke in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.”

While the show has all the ingredients of a successful comedy, especially if you’re a millennial, the first couple of episodes won’t totally hook you in. They’re funny. The cast is great, but, like Isla, the show is just “getting her sea legs.”

However, by the end of the third episode, the show finds its rhythm, and the plots of the ensemble cast become more balanced and cohesive to fit the comedic pacing of the characters, and Hudson does an excellent job of tethering all the moving parts together with her trademark charisma and comedic timing (her outfits are also impeccably styled as are Song’s).

The third episode is also when Jackie Moreno (Fabrizio Guido) becomes a more central part of the show for reasons I won’t spoil, and the show benefits from the trope of a proverbial outsider coming to town. He must find his place within the Waves office while navigating the tricky dynamic between the Gordon siblings.

By the middle of the season, the Waves games and the team’s performance become more integral to the plot, which gives viewers something to root for, and the show benefits from this structure. The players on the team have also had more time to become characters the audience cares about.

The other thing the show has going for it is that it’s a streaming comedy, which necessitates a different style of writing. While the jokes are timely in a general sense, the natural delay between when the show is written and when viewers actually see it is too big of a gap for jokes to be as timely as they can be on network comedies with a faster turnaround time. The result is that “Running Point” is pretty apolitical, which fits both the tone of the show and makes it an escape from current stressors in our country.

By the middle of the season, as the pieces of the show came together and some of those culturally adjacent jokes made me laugh out loud, I knew that I would finish the season. Even though “Running Point” isn’t perfecting the comedic wheel, its first 10 episodes work together as a well-executed version of the wheel that feels specifically made for a millennial viewer like me. And, after I finished the final episode, I already wanted it to be renewed because I can’t wait to laugh about what happens next in this fictional, female-led franchise (or with the love triangle).

“Running Point” is streaming on Netflix.