I think of some of my favourite comedies and find that a pattern emerges. At certain times in my life, I’ve needed funny women. Ahead of this long term, I want to come home to the female characters that remind me that I am not just a sleep-deprived husk with a laundry bag full of regrets – Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon, Tumblr’s vocalising force for food and TV enthusiasts the world over; Tamsin Greig’s Fran Katzenjammer, the snarky best friend you always wanted, ever appearing out of a plume of smoke and wine; and, for the nostalgia trip, Raven Symone, wise, feisty and always up for a laugh.

Which is probably why I have been telling anyone who will listen to watch Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix. Starring Ellie Kemper, the sleeper star of The US Office, it’s a show about women created by a woman. Well, co-created with Robert Carlock, but Fey’s marker is one which it is impossible to miss. Anyone who’s watched 30 Rock will be familiar with her perfect blend of biting satire and pure ridiculousness, as well as her ability to write unique and just plain enjoyable characters. Meanwhile, Kemper is unstoppable as Kimmy, a woman with a middle school-education, starting from scratch. With a mixture of determination and naïvety, she takes on the adult world of smartphones, spin-classes and dick pics with ‘unbreakable’ optimism.

The premise is an unusual one – after being imprisoned in a bunker for 15 years, Kimmy and three other women adapt to a world that pony-tailed cult leader Jon Hamm had brainwashed them into believing no longer existed. As the episodes play out, a theme is developed: it’s sometimes implicit, in the way Manhattan housewife Jacqueline Voorhees pines for her globetrotting husband, and sometimes painfully explicit, as when it is revealed that the cult-leader keeps the ‘Mole Women’, the bunker-dwellers, in line by repeatedly reminding them that they are ‘garbage’.

Fey is at her most inflamed and impassioned, behind all the silliness, imploring her female audience to reject any dominating and manipulative figure that seeks to run their life for them. Kimmy’s first instinct when she leaves the bunker? Buy some light-up Sketchers. Why? Because why the H-E-C-K not?

“Females are strong as hell”, the stand-out line from the jarring, Youtube-remix theme song, is subtly stitched into the writing of every female character. From Xanthippe, the Emoji-addict daughter who’d rather be bird-watching than underage drinking, to Cindy, Kimmy’s best friend in the bunker who buys a sports car and becomes manager of a pet store, because she “likes dogs”. It’s all a lot of fun and, as a result of the quick-witted writing and the seedy setting of a not-so-fairytale New York, never becomes sickly-sweet.

With a cast of old and new faces, including cameos from Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka and Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris, it’s the kind of mainstream American comedy that stands out in a wasteland of clichéd sitcoms like Big Bang Theory and Two and A Half Men. Watch out for Titus Burgess, playing the Broadway-wannabe Titus Andromedon (whose auditioned for The Lion King 20 times in 15 years) – with lines like “But I’ve already done something today”, he’s going to be your spirit animal as exam term comes into full swing.

Episodes are only half an hour long, so you can binge-watch the whole first season without feeling too guilty, or have some self restraint and watch throughout the term. Watch it with your friends, watch it with your family – get out of your bunker of revision and remember just how fun and hopeful life on the outside can be.