When we first heard High Fidelity—the bestselling 1995 novel, which was adapted into a 2000 rom-com, featuring John Cusack as a dickish, Gen X record store owner—would get the TV-series-reboot treatment, the call seemed a little strange. Would it just be about another dickish record store owner (a bearded Bushwick millennial, this time) crying about the Spotify era?

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That was all curbed almost immediately when Hulu casted the brilliant Zoë Kravitz as High Fidelity’s new lead, Rob Fleming. The result? First of all, a much-needed hangout comedy in the age of the prestige drama. More importantly, a critically acclaimed, heartwarming (and frankly, much better) take on the OGs. As Kravitz herself has spoken about, it was one of TV’s most diverse shows, too, telling Variety in June, “The amount of comments, DMs, things on Twitter, articles written about Brown women who love music, were afraid of commitment, who’ve never seen a person like them on television—they feel seen for the first time.”

Even though Kravitz has expressed a wish to come back for another season of the show, Hulu has cancelled High Fidelity. A day after the show’s cancellation, Kravitz posted a few behind-the-scenes photos from the High Fidelity set, including some shots with fellow cast members David H. Holmes and Da’Vine Joy Randolph. In the caption, Kravitz wrote: “I wanna give a shout out to my #highfidelity family. Thank you for all the love and heart you put into this show. I’m in awe of all of you. And thank you to everyone who watched, loved and supported us. #breakupssuck.”

When actress Tessa Thompson replied to the post, “I will miss you alllllllllllll so much,” Kravitz slipped in a criticism of Hulu. “It’s cool. At least Hulu has a ton of other shows starring women of color we can watch. Oh wait.” Kravitz is right—Hulu is thin on original series starring women of color. And if Hulu won’t invest in a story that successfully flipped the tired cliches the older High Fidelity iterations relied on, then what does that mean for the future of the streaming service?

In Nick Hornby’s bestselling 1995 novel by the same title, on which the John Cusack film and the Hulu reboot are based, Rob Fleming is—you guessed it—the dickish, thirty-something owner of Championship Vinyl, a London record store frequented by music snobs and sad sacks. Rob spends his days bro-ing around with his employees, Dick and Barry, who humor his tunnel vision obsessions with mix tapes and desert-island Top Five playlists. When his girlfriend leaves him, Rob sets to the task of reconnecting with five former girlfriends who allegedly broke his heart (his “Top Five Heartbreaks”), yet their testimonials gradually illuminate that Rob’s victimhood complex isn’t entirely earned. Hornby’s Rob is arrogant, elitist, and most damaging of all, deeply phobic about commitment. Basically, Rob is a formative ex-boyfriend familiar to straight women everywhere: a self-important jackass who scratches his itch for superiority through music, who thinks liking classic rock makes him more sensitive or more enlightened than anyone else, who never relinquishes control of the aux cord, not even once.

In the Hulu reboot, the casting of Kravitz turns a tiresome archetype into a revelatory character. Kravitz’s Rob is much the same as Hornby’s, warts and all—a curmudgeonly commitment-phobe who holds “bad” taste in music against others as an unforgivable character flaw—yet to cast a woman of color in this familiar, dudely trope is to create something new entirely. For far too long, music has been one of the many subjects over which men feel ownership and see fit to “explain” to women. How gratifying it is to see a millennial woman of color inhabit that same space of ownership, expertise, and deep passion for music. After decades of seeing women excluded from work as DJs, festival bookers, record label executives, and countless other roles in the business of music, it’s a revelation to see Kravitz’s Rob not just owning and exploring her passion, but making a living at it.

Though there are certainly far more “unlikable” women on screen than ever before, we as a society still have miles to go in celebrating women’s contradictions and complexities. Kravitz’s Rob is a breath of fresh air, in this respect—a woman of color who can be harsh, self-pitying, and self-deluded, but also charming, vulnerable, and searching. In this sense, Kravitz’s Rob breaks free from the “Strong Black Woman” stereotype that has so long dogged Black women, on screen and in reality. Hornby’s Rob is an asshole who mistakenly believes himself to be “the good guy” in his story; so too is Kravitz’s Rob, yet that narrative looks much different on her than on John Cusack. When do women on television ever get to be assholes, as Kravitz so deliciously and so vulnerably does on High Fidelity? So too is there something groundbreaking in Rob’s direct addresses to the camera, each one a searing confessional or a pithy aside. To see Rob own and tell her own story, albeit from a place of an occluded sense of self, is to see something rare—a woman on television allowed to tell it as she sees it, to crack wise, to take up space.

In Hulu’s High Fidelity, the tiresome, dickish white dude is Clyde. Even though he breaks good at the end of the series, his portrayal is a bit of a Trojan horse—deconstructing a nice-guy schtick when he ghosts Rob in the first episode. Rob goes on a first date with him early on in the season, and nearly runs out of the bar. But when Clyde stays overnight, he leaves before Rob wakes up. In the book and movie, the white lead is portrayed as an enviable epitome of cool. In Hulu’s High Fidelity? A smarmy doofus who can’t make good on a promise.

It’s a shame we won’t see these ideas teased out in a new season—and even more depressing to see Hulu refuse to invest in one of its most original and diverse shows. We're in the middle of a streaming TV boom as of last year, Hulu reportedly was working with a $2.5 billion programming budget. That's still a fraction of Netflix's $8 billion wallet, but you'd think Hulu could carve out a home for High Fidelity amidst the Future Mans of its platform. Even if High Fidelity attracted only a modest audience, the show was an important step forward for Hulu, a platform still lagging woefully behind its competitors in offering original content starring women of color.

Hopefully, Kravitz and the High Fidelity faithfuls can drum up enough noise for the show to find a home elsewhere. Until then, the best we can do is make like Rob, queue up some Bowie, grab a fifth, and down it on the nearest fire escape.

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