I do have a soft spot for this show, mainly because I have watched it for many years having started with the 'cycles' on Vimeo - I'm far from alone on that experience of course, but it is not often I see such a successful jump from the world of short films to major networks, so it feels more special to have followed something on that path. Anyway, the fourth season returns with its tone and strengths continuing consistently. As with previous seasons, it gives The Guy more time in episodes than he perhaps originally got, but mostly it works well because these threads do have the same approach as the wider stories, even if they have the 'main' character in them.
Where the show works best though are the segments where we start with a pretty much clean slate. In these segments the writers have to give us a life as quickly as possible. With less talented writers this would mean much more on-the-nose exposition, but here it tends to mean that we get a lot of detail in the small things. Just like life itself, some of these are cheering, some are awkward, some are moving, and some are cringe-inducing. All of them feel real, and very much stories of a complex city of compressed lives and urban struggles. Like I said, some of the elements of The Guy don't quite work, the dog in particular; he works best when linking to others (which is the majority of the time) but any longer focus on him doesn't work as well - perhaps because we don't really know him and the writers struggle to develop him while also retaining him as a device.
Overall though, another very strong season. It continues to be weird and filled with oddity, which will cause this to be dismissed as 'liberal' and 'counter-culture' by those (like myself) who do not have real access to such diverse lives, but in reality it is a very human show and messy sex and messy lives just makes it more convincing in that