Though it only began working for me as an overall series in its last couple of episodes, Netflix‘s new animated comedy Strip Law is, from its very first installment, an impressive pop culture-referencing machine pandering directly to the Xennial sensibility.

I’m not completely sure that’s a compliment, but if you’re going to do something, you might as well commit fully. And Strip Law is absolutely committed to making sure that everybody watching it — or at least everybody with the patience to watch more than 15 or 20 minutes of the pilot, which otherwise isn’t especially funny — is provided with at least one reference they’re convinced nobody other than their five closest friends will understand. Once again, shared appreciation of obscurity is the great unifier.

What else does the show offer? Inside jokes about Las Vegas! But not deep inside. Like, if you’ve spent a single desultory weekend losing money at a mid-price hotel/casino on The Strip, you’ll get those jokes. Actually, if you once changed planes at Harry Reid International, you’ll be fine.

And beyond that? Probably not a lot. Though like I’ve already said, the last two episodes of the 10-episode first season — a madcap parody of award shows and a madcap parody of, naturally, Franklin & Bash — were finally moving in a direction that felt more creatively promising than just, “Hey, would you point at the screen in amused recognition if I made a reference to, say, the not-so-great Dana Carvey comedy vehicle The Master of Disguise?” (If the answer is “Yes,” you are the target demographic for Strip Law.)

Created by The Late Show veteran Cullen Crawford, Strip Law focuses on Lincoln Gumb (Adam Scott), son of a Las Vegas legal legend who was somewhat recently killed in what was apparently a gory mishap. Lincoln is haunted by: his mother’s memory; his mother’s non-specifically unlikable former legal partner (Keith David‘s Steven Nichols); and his own legal mediocrity, a dryness that makes it difficult for Lincoln to compete against Vegas’ flashiest legal minds.

After one particularly lackluster trial, Lincoln runs into Sheila Flambé (Janelle James), a sexy magician’s assistant denied the magical spotlight by the city’s old boys club. A juror for Lincoln’s latest loss, Sheila offers Lincoln advice on how to become a real Las Vegas lawyer, and he hires her to fuse her knowledge of pizzazz with his knowledge of boring legal stuff.

They’re joined, in their cramped office in a strip mall on The Strip, by Lincoln’s niece Irene, a weight-lifting teen who wants to be taken seriously as an adult and who somehow becomes the firm’s chief investigator; and Glem Blochman, an eccentric disbarred lawyer, whose capacity at the firm is…um…saying weird things and providing the show an opportunity to do “A” and “B” storylines with two characters apiece.

This, incidentally, is the sort of meta exploration of the televised lawyer genre that might be the other thing Strip Law offers. It’s a show whose writers have watched a lot of TV and have a lot of opinions on what makes a good or bad legal show and the desire only to comment on those conventions rather than actually subvert them or work around them entirely.

Strip Law is a show that prefers to keep everything very close to the surface, including its case-of-the-week mocking of how surface-level Las Vegas is — even if roughly half those cases don’t have much to do with Vegas at all. A divorce case involving the parents of a teen who briefly died as a child and now does a mentalist act conning rubes with stories about Heaven? Sure. That’s Vegas-y. A case related to two men each claiming to be the real Santa Claus? Not Vegas-y at all, though it sounds like the sort of thing David E. Kelley would have done on one of his 50 quirky shows that ran simultaneously in the ’90s and ’00s. Since Strip Law has a multi-part joke related to Boston Public, the Kelley oeuvre is surely a key part of the show’s DNA.

The references highlight a lot of that DNA, which is wide-ranging.

No show or movie gets referenced more than The Simpsons, which is saluted via nods to individual Springfieldians, an extended bit in which a character attempts to make her footage impossible to clear for a documentary, and even tossed-off lines of dialogue that are obvious yet unattributed.

There’s an entire underdog sports episode — another of those plot threads with nothing Vegas-related at all — nodding to The Mighty Ducks, salutes to multiple Stanley Kubrick movies, and a runner tied to CBS’ Bull, proving that neither quality nor real-world scandal can get in the way of post-modernism.

Most people will at least get all those primary-level citations.

But if you happen to be in that bizarre generational and obsessional intersection that can find laughter in jokes about individual figures from the documentary American Movie, NBA legend Darrell Griffith and costumed crimefighter Pistachio Disguisey, Strip Law is for you and possibly only you.

Unfortunately, the references only occasionally feel like they’ve been organically tailored to come from specific characters on Strip Law, because the main characters in Strip Law are fuzzy reference delivery systems within a series that’s a fuzzy reference delivery system.

It helps to have vocal talent as instantly embraceable as Scott, David, Root and especially James, but there are countless times I laughed at a particularly strange reference, tried to make sense of why that reference would have been coming from that character, and decided the effort wasn’t worth it. If you asked me to explain why I found it very difficult to build a connection to the show that goes deeper than “I can’t wait to see what weird ’80s thing they’ll acknowledge next,” it’s that, for all their checklist of traumas (well-summarized with gynecological specificity in the penultimate episode), none of the characters in Strip Law feel like…people. Even an extended joke about the new paralegal named Kevin, who inexplicably pops up and irritates nearly everybody because he seems to have appeared out of nowhere, falls flat because none of the characters actually seem to have come from anywhere. Kevin isn’t any more random or inexplicably shoehorned into the story than Irene or Glem.

The familiarity expends to the animation itself, courtesy of the prolific Titmouse studio. It’s a lot of hit-and-miss background gags, with a general flatness that gets exposed in one episode featuring the Nevada Dates, a funny takeoff on the California Raisins that mixes up the visual style for just long enough to make me wish the show did more of that. Of course, with a show this dedicated to references, it’s impossible to know when a piece of less-than-fresh character design is intentionally derivative. Like, is Glem’s entire look intentionally paying homage to Franklin Sherman, the loopiest and possibly best supporting character from The Critic, or just a shameless rip-off? Probably the former, but who’s to say?

Shows like Venture Brothers, Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Archer have proven that it’s more than possible to be a reference-heavy genre pastiche and still generate emotional investment. At the end of the Strip Law season, there are hints that its cumulative effect could be greater than the sum of its puns, near-rhymes and esoteric shoutouts. Not that some viewers will want anything more.