text: If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly behind on television, so much so that you might have let Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the Douglas Adams-based dramedy starring Elijah Wood and Samuel Barnett, slip through the cracks when it premiered last year.
  
  This isn’t just a mistake because of the wonderful zaniness of the show in its own right, but because Dirk Gently is the perfect show to watch in the age of peak television and content. It is a palate cleanser for all of the tropey, formula-driven shows you are watching elsewhere. It is TV therapy for a pop culture moment where, in the rush to get out as much content as possible, networks and studios are increasingly relying on formula to get eyeballs to their on-screen stories.
  
  “Everything in Dirk is an attack on formula,” show creator Max Landis told us at New York Comic Con when we asked about the formula-busting content of his show. “I still use formulas and there are secret formulas. My stuff that I do subconsciously — there are repeating themes in my work, if you look — but a lot of them are deliberate subversions.”
  
  The first episode of Season 2, set to premiere this Saturday on BBC America, opens with a gay, pink-haired prince off to fulfill his destiny. It both plays into the generic properties of a fantasy prince character — strong and brave and good with a sword (this is not a pun) — while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of what kind of character fantasy princes are usually allowed to be.