With all the Netflix traffic seeming to go to Black Mirror at the moment it will be a shame if this first TV series for Miranda Sings, Haters Back Off, gets overlooked. It is utterly nuts, but in a good way.

Miranda Sings is the creation of Colleen Ballinger, who has become a YouTube superstar thanks to her awful pop cover versions and life-tips. The series opens up the narrative to focus not just on her misguided quest for superstardom but also to reveal her almost-as-oddball family, such as her uncle Jim (Steve Little) who fancies himself as a small-town Simon Cowell and her dysfunctional mother Bethany, played by Angela Kinsey. Miranda’s existentialism-reading sister Emily (Francesca Reale) is an oasis of sanity amid the mayhem.

In the first episode the lipstick-smeared, home-schooled outcast uploads her debut screechy music video and waits for it to go viral. And waits. And waits. Unlike in real life the clicks trickle in. And when it does get a few hits we see that they are from her obsessive neighbour Patrick Mooney (Erik Stocklin), frantically finger-bashing the link on three side-by-side computers.

This is certainly an odd world, though there are echoes of other odd worlds too, from Pee-Wee Herman to David Lynch. I’ve got a lot of time for Miranda Sings though. I saw her do a gig in London to an audience of adolescents a couple of years ago and to my surprise she came across as less of an egomaniac and more of a subversive, clever role model, criticising the sexualisation of young women and the rise of pornography. It will be interesting to see if these elements crop up in her TV version. But even if it is only a loopy small-town sitcom Haters Back Off is still worth watching.  

Available on Netflix now.