But the season is slow to serialize; it wants adventure in detours. A lonesome, justifiably paranoid trucker spouting road wisdom, played by Chau, is an early treat. Light and S. Epatha Merkerson sizzle and hiss as a pair of rebellious broads at a nursing home where Charlie briefly finds work; each new twist in their backstories exposes a darker layer to their cackling defiance. But it’s the fourth installment that best showcases the series’ gleaming black comedy. An aging heavy-metal front woman named Ruby Ruin (Sevigny, looking deliciously mean with bleached eyebrows) goes back on tour with her band and tries to write a follow-up to their one hit, a song that all of them have grown to resent. They bring along a much younger drummer (Nicholas Cirillo), whom they first treat like dirt, and then even less than that. Despite murder being a necessary conceit, “Poker Face” is a largely sun-soaked show. But, every so often, the series channels the rage that drives people to snuff out the threats that jostle too close.

If “Poker Face” knows when to add a dash of vinegar to balance out Lyonne’s raspy sweetness, then the comic docuseries “Paul T. Goldman” offers up an experimental plate of astringent saccharin. The show’s convoluted, fourth-wall-breaking premise is as follows: Paul, a self-described schlemiel in his early sixties, tells the story of his second marriage—to a fraudster named Audrey—and the delirious discoveries that he makes about her after their divorce, which he has turned into a self-published book and a screenplay. The director of the series, Jason Woliner, allows Paul to act out the more dramatic scenes from his script alongside recognizable actors like Melinda McGraw, who plays Audrey, and Dennis Haysbert, in the role of an F.B.I. agent. The first episode frames the tale as true crime. Woliner, who occasionally appears onscreen, indulges Paul’s B-movie imagination and transparent self-aggrandizement, but understands that his protagonist is an unreliable narrator at best—even before the “revelations” of Audrey’s links to sex work and her ostensible pimp’s involvement in an international trafficking ring.

“Holy shit! I married a hooker?!” Paul says, acting out the dialogue he’s written. For all its faults, the series is an astute portrait of a man who has mastered the art of concealing his misogyny behind a bumbling benignity. When Paul recalls how he met his first wife, he tells a sad-sack tale of turning forty alone and wanting to start a family—a desire that takes him to Russia to pursue a mail-order bride who is twenty-seven and “model-quality gorgeous.” (He does not mention why a catalogue for mail-order brides was sent to his house in the first place.) Paul ends up marrying a different Russian woman and having a son with her. After the couple part ways, the boy’s well-being becomes Paul’s stated rationale for wanting to marry again. He meets Audrey on a dating site and proposes after three months.

For most of the series’ six-part run, the question fuelling the narrative is “What exactly are we watching?” Is Paul a cursed narcissist coping with his loneliness by retreating into harmless fantasy, or a delusional creep whose extensive lies and disturbing patterns of harassment, even abuse, will be exposed? But Paul’s undependability is soon matched by Woliner’s. It’s hard not to have qualms about the director setting up his protagonist to receive so much undeserved attention and sympathy, particularly as Paul’s ugliness toward women comes into sharper focus. Strikingly, Paul also reminisces about a time he got fleeced so badly by a male employee that he was forced to shutter his business, but he never seeks redress from the malfeasant. Or maybe none of it ever happened.

Woliner, who’s been working on some version of “Paul T. Goldman” for more than a decade, too often glosses over the grimmer implications of Paul’s actions, such as the revenge porn he sends to Audrey’s parents, whose woeful demise is turned into yet another sordid shock. It’s particularly jarring to contrast the series with Woliner’s best-known film, the “Borat” sequel, which aims some of its most serrated gags at the complicity of bystanders who witness the titular character’s attempts to sell his teen-age daughter. Here, Woliner seems more concerned with giving Paul the opportunity to parse the difference between trafficking women and ordering a wife from a catalogue.

Paul, it turns out, is not only a chauvinist but a fairly run-of-the-mill one, and Woliner’s anxiety about setting up such an ordinary (if unpleasant) loser for nationwide ridicule may be why he gives his subject the last word, even after disputing most of his claims. The director perhaps should have worried more that, by giving Paul a platform, he is enabling the man to spread lies about his ex-wife, who doesn’t participate in the docuseries, to a larger audience. By the end, there’s no reason to trust Woliner any more than his subject.