The final episode of Quarry’s first season airs tonight on Cinemax, and I was going to give you five reasons why you need to be watching this show. But then I saw the Wall Street Journal somehow broke into my mind palace and published a piece that was very suspiciously titled “Five Reasons to Catch Up on the Sleeper TV Drama ‘Quarry’,” which puts me in a slightly awkward position. So in order to not be shown up, I give you the following: Not Five, But Six Reasons You’d Be Foolish to Miss Out on the Excellent Quarry Which Is Now Just Winding Down Its First Season But in This Age of Streaming Everything You Can Probably Figure Out How to Catch Up Pretty Quickly, Particularly If You Know Someone Who Has a Password to MaxGo, Cinemax’s Online Streaming Platform, and Get on That Because This Show Is Goddamn Great.

1. It’s short. Quarry’s first season runs a mere eight one-hour episodes. While the show is terrific and every minute of it is solid, its brief episode arc is a blessing in an age where there is simply too much damn television to watch. An illustration of my point: Hey, did you finish Luke Cage yet? Yeah, thought not.

2. It’s sexy. Lead actors Logan Marshall-Green and Jodi Balfour play a married couple in 1972. Mac (Marshall-Green) has just come back from the war to Joni (Balfour), and they have lots of great-looking sex while also dealing with some pretty substantial marital problems. You root for them even when they’re terrible to each other.

3. It’s smart. Mac’s post-war trauma is in full effect, and the show handles this intelligently and considerately. However, a bigger chunk of Quarry’s first season is dedicated to the racial politics of 1972 Memphis—a thriving cultural hotspot but not a particularly peaceful one. This is the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot a few years earlier, where Stax and Big Star were making important, influential music, where the Deep South reared its head in institutional racism and in the white population’s response to issues like school district busing. Mac’s fellow soldier in Vietnam, Arthur (Jamie Hector, AKA Marlo from The Wire), has issues of his own upon his return from the war, and as the show goes on, we spend more and more time with Arthur's family, who initially seemed like supporting characters. They ground the show's more sensationalistic noir-crime elements in real-world humanity.

4. It’s suspenseful. Mac and Arthur are approached by a shady looking character who’s simply know as the Broker. He’s got some work for the ex-soldiers, but it might not be the kind of work they imagined they’d be doing when they got back from ’Nam. Let’s say guns and stakeouts are involved, as is a shifty character with one leg. It's delightfully pulpy and grittily real at the same time.

5. It’s soulful. Okay, that sounds dumb. But as the WSJ piece points out, there is a LOT of great music in Quarry, much of it sourced from Memphis itself, which, as I mentioned, was a hotbed of music at the time. Elvis was there, the Beale Street blues scene was thriving, and the city offered a grittier, funkier, rockier take on the American popular song when compared to the slick country sound that was going on a few miles east in Nashville.

6. It’s stacked. The cast is fantastic and the bench is deep. Damon Herriman (whose face you’ll probably recognize) plays Buddy, a co-worker of Mac, and his character—a gay hit man and weapons dealer—is unlike anyone I’ve seen on screen before. Peter Mullan (another “that guy”) is similarly excellent as the Broker, and Mustafa Shakir is remarkable in a small but vital role as a session bass player caught up in some bad things.

Quarry is based on a book series by comics writer Max Allen Collins, and I’m told the show is very different from the hard-boiled nature of the books. Quarry the show, meanwhile, is probably the best hour-long show on TV right now (it’s not as good as Atlanta, but it’s close). The eighth and last episode of Quarry’s first season airs tonight—and let’s pray it gets renewed—but if you haven’t watched any of it yet, the entire first episode is available on YouTube.

Oh, and I just thought of a seventh. 7. The Fall's third season doesn't go up on Netflix until tomorrow.