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Since flipping the House of Representatives in last year’s midterms, Democrats have been waiting to see real oversight return to the halls of Congress. That arrived on Tuesday, with the Committee on Oversight and Reform’s first hearing of 2019. But the subject at hand may have disappointed those who were hoping for a dramatic broadside against the Trump administration.

“Our first witness today is not President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen,” said chairman Elijah Cummings. “It’s not someone from the White House or even the Trump administration... The first witness is Antoinette Worsham.”

Worsham, a working mother from Cincinnati wearing a T-shirt reading “Patients Over Profits,” told the committee about her two daughters, both of whom were diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. When the oldest, Antavia, turned 21, she was kicked off the Bureau for Children of Medical Handicaps, a state program that helped pay for her insulin. Unable to afford the medication, Antavia began to ration it. Eventually, she died. Worsham’s second child, Antanique, a freshman at the University of Toledo, fears the same fate.

“In two years my daughter will be 21,” Worsham told the committee, her voice cracking. “I am crying out and asking for you to review the pharmaceutical drug gouging and make healthcare affordable for all.”

Cummings has been working on the issue of high drug prices for a decade. Tuesday’s hearing was the first of what looks to be his signature investigation, an analogue to Henry Waxman’s investigation of the tobacco industry when he ran the Oversight Committee in the 1990s. It’s a reminder to Democrats of the importance of overseeing more than just the Trump administration—of the power of Congress not just to check the president, but make a difference in people’s lives.

Health care was the top issue in the midterm elections, making drug company price-gouging a natural subject of inquiry. Prescription drug prices are expected to go up to $610 billion by 2021, and for every price that gets cut, another 96 increase. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects prescription drug spending as a primary driver of overall health care inflation.

Innovation, in the form of new advances in medicine, is not the cause of this steady price rise. It mostly comes from existing medications. Insulin, for instance, is a 100-year-old drug that companies have “evergreened” through incremental changes to the makeup of the drug, which resets the 20-year patent clock. Insulin costs per patient doubled from 2012 to 2016, and at the beginning of the year, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk raised their insulin prices again.

Cummings’s Oversight Committee is taking on the industry in a systematic fashion. Two weeks ago, he sent letters to twelve major drug companies, asking for internal communications about price increases and preserving market share, as well as estimates of investment in research and development. Repeatedly in the hearing, Democrats made the point that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than researching new drugs.

The hearing featured several researchers and experts on the drug supply chain, as well as Worsham. Future ones will undoubtedly include CEOs of the leading drug companies, contrasting the personal stories of dying patients with the cold financial calculus of Big Pharma executives. Maybe Cummings will end up with a picture as famous as the shot of the tobacco CEOs with their hands raised, testifying under oath that they had no idea their product was addictive.

There’s no shortage of legislative ideas to prevent skyrocketing prices. Prescription drugs are currently organized through patent monopolies that give 20 years’ exclusivity to treatments. Congressman Ro Khanna and Senator Bernie Sanders would break those monopoly contracts and license medications for generic competition if the prices exceeded an international benchmark. Senator Elizabeth Warren would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing to manufacture generic versions of excessively priced or inaccessible drugs. And that’s on top of more common proposals, like having Medicare directly negotiate with drug companies over prices or importing lower-price drugs from overseas.

Most consumers know that drug prices are high and getting higher. But a congressional investigation that yields real information from inside the executive suites of pharmaceutical companies can build momentum. It can spur legal action, as it did in the tobacco case. It can set a roadmap for legislation, like the series of reports from former Senator Carl Levin’s subcommittee on shady financial practices that informed what became the Dodd-Frank Act.

It can even lead to bipartisan support. At yesterday’s hearing, Mark Meadows, the head of the Freedom Caucus who is seen as a close confidant of Donald Trump, said that he was “conveying a message from the President… he is serious in working in a bipartisan way to lower the cost of prescription drugs.” Trump’s actions thus far on drug prices have been limited and fairly ineffective, but even he has proposed some solid ideas, like eliminating rebates that push up list prices and forcing certain drugs to conform prices to international benchmarks. Good oversight makes it impossible to ignore pressing problems and can cut through the partisan fog.

Congress has lost a lot of institutional memory over the years, and perhaps the greatest deficiency has been in the area of oversight. Congress’ role should not be limited to overseeing the executive branch, although that’s certainly important. Committees can use oversight as a kind of field study for the challenges facing Americans outside of Washington, to identify and inform priorities. And in doing so, Congress can get closer to the people by showing its interest in the people’s business. As Cummings raged at the end of the hearing, “The cost of doing nothing is never nothing. I am going to paint Ms. Worsham’s face in the DNA of every cell of my brain to try and make sure that her other daughter, who’s facing the same thing, does not die.”

You could say that Howard Schultz has daddy issues. The former Starbucks CEO returns to his late father again and again in his new memoir, From the Ground Up, and often with disapproval. “My father never completed high school and spent his working life ricocheting between odd, low-paying jobs,” he writes. “He had few employable skills aside from driving. And while there’s dignity in a day’s labor, no matter how simple or technical, my father didn’t derive any sense of pride from his work.” Worse yet, “My father also spent more money than he had.”

This scolding is the setup for a heartbreaking turn of events: When Schultz was seven, his father slipped on a sheet of ice on the job, breaking his foot and ankle. He was “dismissed without notice,” leaving him with “no income, no health insurance, no workers’ compensation.” Without savings—and with his mother seven months’ pregnant—the family was forced to rely on Jewish Family Services. Later, when debt collectors called their home, Schultz’s parents would put him on the phone to turn them away; when the family ran out of money, they sent him out to family and friends to ask for loans. Schultz’s mother eventually nicknamed his father “Mr. Horizontal” because he “spent so much time lying on our couch.”

This experience informs Schultz’s current flirtation with an independent bid for president. “My exposure to their financial trials had instilled in me an aversion to debt,” he writes early in From the Ground Up. And that aversion is the centerpiece—the only piece, really—of his nascent proto-campaign platform. “If America was a company at $21.5 trillion of debt―adding a trillion dollars a year―we would be facing insolvency,” Schultz said on Monday night at an event promoting his book.

Schultz argues that America’s political instability is driven by the government’s lack of fiscal discipline (just as his family’s instability was driven by his spendthrift father). What the country needs, then, is the same approach that made him rich: to pull itself up by the bootstraps, and tighten its belt. But Schultz has taken the wrong lessons from his childhood. If anything, From the Ground Up is an argument for the government to do more, not less, to help its most vulnerable people—exactly the argument being made by the Democrats whom Schultz has spent the past week mocking.

In recent interviews, Schultz has struggled to articulate a political vision outside of his singular obsession. He considers the $21 trillion national debt an existential threat to the nation, and blames both parties for it: Under Trump, Republicans have wasted a strong economy by passing a debt-ballooning $1.5 trillion tax cut, while Democrats are proposing costly and irresponsible policies like a Green New Deal and Medicare for All.

“To those who say an independent run would help ensure the re-election of Donald Trump, I say the two parties’ inability to come together to serve the people has created the opportunity for a centrist independent to be successful,” he wrote in a USA Today op-ed on Tuesday. On The View, he explained why he couldn’t run as a Democrat. “Watch every Democrat go to [early primary states like New Hampshire and Iowa] and have to be disingenuous and probably make a false promise … just to be able to get elected in the primary in those states,” he said. “In order to run as a Democrat today, you have to fall in line with free Medicare for everybody, free college for everybody, a free job for everybody.”

This reference to “a free job”—an apparent reference to proposals for a job guarantee—is revealing. For Schultz, the most important thing to deliver for people is the dignity of work. “I fiercely believe that Starbucks’ attempts to be a different kind of company—one that my own father, a working class laborer, never had a chance to work for—are worth sharing at this fragile yet auspicious moment in our country’s history, when truth and dignity need to make a thunderous comeback,” he writes in the book’s preface. Looking back at his childhood, Schultz doesn’t see missing social programs that could have helped unskilled laborers like his father; he sees missing companies like Starbucks that could have given him an identity.

It was the humiliation of shooing away debt collectors and begging for money that drove Schultz, who is among the 400 richest people in America, to provide benefits for his employees. In From the Ground Up, like his earlier memoirs, Schultz proudly notes that Starbucks was the first company to offer both health insurance and stock options to its employees. In Schultz’s telling, the benevolence of corporations and a public commitment to the dignity of work can cure everything that ails America. This combination, in Schultz’s view, can not only lift people out of poverty, but help solve the country’s most complex and intractable problems, like racism—a line of thought that led to Starbucks’s disastrous Race Together campaign. Schultz is now making the case that the same approach could work politically: that the government must unleash the brilliance of American corporations. For instance, he recently said he would ask “tech companies” to “solve the problem of border security.”

But that doesn’t mean Schultz sees no role for the government. He gives the game away in a section detailing his decision to sell the Seattle SuperSonics, the NBA franchise which then moved to Oklahoma City. Schultz blames the city for his decision to sell the team because it didn’t give him hundreds of millions in public money, tax breaks, and other subsidies to build a new arena—even though such taxpayer-funded handouts have been proven to have no positive effect on spurring economic growth. One gets the sense that Schultz believes the state exists to empower—and enrich—billionaires and corporations, who will then supposedly use that corporate welfare to solve problems like health care, infrastructure, and immigration. The problem is, that accurately describes the status quo in Washington today—minus the problem-solving.

Early in From the Ground Up, Schultz admits that his own approach to debt doesn’t square with his experience as an executive. Even though he knew, “as a businessperson, that debt was not dangerous if managed well and that credit is essential to jump-starting a small business,” he remains averse to it for deeply personal reasons. The book could use more such honesty, but Schultz’s perspective of his childhood is hopelessly clouded by his subsequent professional success and extravagant wealth. Any clear-eyed reader can see that his father was undone not by occasionally treating himself to “a manicure and a fancy haircut,” but by an incomplete education, lack of professional development, and ultimately a fluke injury.

The past is present: The story of Schultz’s father resonates today more than ever. For years now, a majority of states have been cutting investment in public schools. There’s a paucity of workforce training or other programs to close the skills gap in the U.S. And the country is still far from achieving what the world’s leading nations implemented ages ago: universal health care. The Democrats are having a robust debate over the best solutions to these problems. The Republicans are largely apathetic. And here is Howard Schultz, implicitly echoing a notorious refrain: I alone can fix it.

Leslye Headland, the co-creator of the new comedy Russian Doll on Netflix, is perhaps our sharpest dramatic writer when it comes to cruelty. Headland, who created the series with Amy Poehler and the actress Natasha Lyonne (who also stars in the show and co-wrote several episodes), got her start as a playwright in the mid-2000s, when her main preoccupation was misbehavior—the spiky words and blithe, callous actions that lead people to hurt others and resent themselves, the little, daily snips and slights that we stay up at night replaying in our heads, wondering what we might have done differently.

Beginning in 2007, Headland decided to write seven contemporary plays, based on the seven deadly sins, as a way of exploring our worst tendencies. Her sin play cycle, beginning with Cinephilia, her exploration of “lust,” in which a Brooklyn couple stays up late debating movies and sex and also nearly clawing one other’s eyes out, is a triumph of vulgarity and pettiness and prickly human emotions. There are characters in Headland’s early work that show vulnerability and yearning, but they are swiftly punished or turned into punchlines.

Perhaps this is most apparent in Bachelorette, her razor-edged 2010 “gluttony” play, which later became a criminally underrated 2012 feature film, directed by Headland and starring Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, and Lizzy Caplan as a trio of drug-addled, selfish, body-dysmorphic, alcoholic, miserable millennial harridans, determined to sabotage their most earnest friend’s wedding day. Bachelorette, the film, did not get as much attention as Bridesmaids, which came out a year earlier and had its share of blue jokes but ultimately embraced its characters with a gentle, gooey hug. Bachelorette, on the other hand, slaps its protagonists across the face with an open palm. It sends them into spirals of self-loathing and catty desperation (nearly every character in the film has some sort of eating disorder; much of the female bonding takes place around vomiting in a bathroom stall) and pumps its main trio full of cocaine and champagne which leads to unforgivable mishaps, like ripping their friend’s wedding dress to shreds the night before the ceremony. Writing about the play when it debuted in 2010, a New York Times critic put it this way: “the fun of being young, comfortable and playfully wasted begins to bleed into a life of stunted drifting, frustration and wanton self-destruction.”

Wanton self-destruction is the backbone of Russian Doll, which turns the concept literal: Its protagonist willfully self-immolates, over and over, in the most dramatic way possible. In other words, she keeps dying. Lyonne plays Nadia, a droll, chain-smoking New Yorker with a wild tangle of red hair, who is caught in a Groundhog Day-esque loop on the night of her 36th birthday party. The first episode follows her through her first death: She starts her night sighing into a gilded mirror in a sleek, black-tiled bathroom that looks like it could belong in Studio 54. Somewhere in the distance, Harry Nilsson’s jangly “Gotta Get Up” starts playing, and we hear a cacophony of muddled voices, a sign that merriment is taking place right outside the bathroom. When Nadia emerges, she surveys the large crowd, who have gathered together at her friend Maxine’s cavernous apartment (a converted Yeshiva in the East Village, the height of moneyed, bohemian chic). The guests are all there to celebrate her, but Nadia doesn’t seem to appreciate this fact, or even seem interested in attending her own party. She floats toward Maxine (the kookily dry Greta Lee, swaddled in crystals and velvet choker necklaces), who is basting a chicken in the kitchen and smoking an “Israeli joint,” laced with cocaine. “Sweet birthday baby!” Maxine exclaims (a phrase that begins to lose meaning as you hear it again, and again, and again, throughout the series). Nadia rolls her eyes. Mostly, she seems agitated by the fact that she has to interact with people for the night.

Lyonne’s strongest muscles as an actress are sardonic detachment and antsy discomfort, and she flexes both in full force in these early scenes. Instead of enjoying her fête, Nadia does several shots and desperately skulks around the room hunting for someone to leave with. She finally lands on a misogynist blowhard professor named Mike (Jeremy Bobb). She drags him first to a bodega, and then back to her own apartment a few blocks away for mediocre sex until she grows bored and kicks him out. What we learn from these brief scenes is that Nadia has a severe block when it comes to human connections. She is a devout loner, a woman who prefers the solitude of the bathroom mirror to a party, who blots out her nights with anonymous sex and obliterating substances, whose default settings are caustic and surly. Lyonne is not a wispy mover; she is lead-footed, walking with a slightly bowlegged, clomping gait that can make her look like a dizzy marionette. She is a brilliant physical comedian, the kind that a silent film director might have called a real scamp. Her heavy body language reaffirms Nadia’s internal weight; she’s carrying around a lot of baggage, dragging it behind her everywhere she goes like an invisible carcass.

The first time we watch Nadia die, she is going out for cigarettes after the professor leaves. She forgets to look both ways before stepping into the street, and a taxi barrels into her body, sending her flying onto the pavement. A pool of blood seeps out from her head, as her empty saucer eyes stare right into the camera lens. And then, the screen goes black, we hear the opening strains of “Gotta Get Up,” and suddenly Nadia is back in Maxine’s disco bathroom, her body fully intact and without a scratch. And the cycle begins again.

For anyone familiar with Groundhog Day, Nadia’s purgatorial limbo should feel familiar. The show even borrows directly from that film: She always comes back to life with an increasingly cloying pop song (in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray knows he’s alive again when his alarm clock plays “I’ve Got You Babe”); she befriends a homeless man whom she tries to save from freezing to death (Murray’s homeless friend was named “Pop,” Nadia’s is called “Horse”); she goes through the same process of confusion followed by elation when she learns that she is doomed to repeat the same day dozens of times. Both the show and the film follow a flawed, selfish person who interprets their looping as a kind of divine punishment, a lesson designed by some supernatural force to teach them compassion and tenderness.

And yet, Russian Doll diverges from Groundhog Day in important ways. For one, it doesn’t shy away from the trauma involved in dying repeatedly—Nadia experiences each one of her deaths as the painful tragedy it is. When she falls down a flight of stairs and breaks her neck, it’s brutal and terrifying. When she goes to visit her late mother’s friend Ruth, who acts as her surrogate mother, and Ruth accidentally shoots her thinking she is a burglar, she weeps as she sees Ruth’s agonized face. What Nadia realizes, as she reboots, is that there may be simultaneous dimensions, and in each one that she has left behind, she’s still dead, and that she is leaving a mounting wake of tragedies and bloody messes and consequences. Groundhog Day treated Phil Connors’s infinite rebirths as quirky comedic fodder; Russian Doll immediately undercuts this premise. Nadia’s deaths are horrible, every single time. When she dies in a gas explosion in Ruth’s apartment, Ruth explodes too—her endless spiral brings a body count. Nadia carries the trauma of every fresh death with her, until she can barely look at herself in the mirror anymore.

But—and this is the case with all of Headland’s most cutting work—the show doesn’t torture Nadia just for the fun of it. There is a reason she is trapped; she was trapped even before she started dying. Throughout the show, we learn that Nadia’s mother (Chloë Sevigny) was dangerous, mentally ill to the point where she could not be trusted with a knife. Lyonne reveals Nadia’s painful childhood slowly, in jerky monologues that drip out of her throat like acrid syrup. Nadia believes, deep down, that her mother died young because of her decision not to live with her after child services got involved, and she has shouldered that burden all her life, remaining distant and standoffish when it comes to intimacy.

To sublimate her memories, Nadia submerges herself into drugs, into work (she is a video game programmer), into nicotine, into internet rabbit holes, into snide comments, into rudeness. Her one true friend is a feral cat named Oatmeal, who lives part-time at the bodega because she doesn’t want to bind any living thing to her permanently. Ruth, her mother’s friend, tells Nadia one afternoon that she seems to be chasing down death at every corner (she doesn’t know the half of it), a sentiment that brings Nadia to tears. She sees it all clearly: She was killing herself before she ever started killing herself. She’s let her heart go black and her liver go to ruin.

She is, however, not alone. In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors must repeat the same day thousands of times without ever having a friend he can talk to about it, at least not one who will remember their conversation in the morning. What Headland does brilliantly to flip this formula is that she gives Nadia a sidekick, a fellow looper. Early in the series, Nadia enters an elevator which quickly starts to malfunction and drops to the ground. Most of the passengers are screaming, knowing they are hurtling toward death. One man, a tall, handsome brunette in his twenties, remains perfectly calm. Nadia asks him, “Didn’t you get the news? We’re about to die.” He says that it really doesn’t matter to him; he dies all the time.

In her next life, Nadia rushes to find this stranger, who turns out to be a neurotic perfectionist named Alan who also lives in the East Village and spends his days working out, wearing perfectly crisp Oxford shirts, and reciting empowerment mantras to himself. Alan and Nadia quickly learn that their fates are intertwined—they began dying on the same night, and they always die at the exact same moment. On the night he first died, Alan lost his girlfriend, and, as we learn, his will to live. He hurled himself off the side of a building. Once he and Nadia meet, the show takes on the quality of a good noir detective story: Two unlikely allies race through New York City at night, trying to work out why the universe glued them together.

At this point, Russian Doll picks up to a clip; the duo is not only trying to solve the mystery of their reincarnations, but also racing against time, as people and places begin to evaporate between deaths. Both Alan and Nadia were disengaged zombies in life, but they are electric in death, heaving themselves fully into their adventures. For the first time, they both feel an extreme bond with another human being; and all it took to get there was hundreds of fatalities.

More than anything else, Russian Doll is a showcase for Lyonne, who bites into this role like ripe fruit, baring her teeth. She’s scrappy, daffy, mischievous, and magnetic. She careens from slapstick to pathos in mere moments, and she makes us feel every death in our gut. We ache like she aches. Headland may be the queen of writing cruelty, but she gave Lyonne a valentine with Nadia—finally, a role that is equal to what the actress can give. With every death scene, Lyonne peels back another layer to show us a new trick. After months of dying, Nadia finally wants to live. She wants more joy, more pain, more music, more dancing. To say her desire was hard-earned is an understatement. Headland and Lyonne show us that sometimes to get to where you need to be, you not only have to go through hell, but sometimes you have to get stuck there.