American television has become very good at casting handsome disasters. Give us a divorced man in his forties, a failing career, a cigarette habit, a romantic crisis and a potentially fatal medical condition, and somebody will find a movie-star jaw to put underneath the wreckage. The guy will be rumpled, sure, but in that carefully moisturized, premium-cable way. Even his collapse will look good.

Ariel, the hero of The Best Heart Attack of My Life, would never get cast that way in an American version.

And thank God for that.

Played by Alan Sabbagh, Ariel is overweight, chain-smoking, insecure, professionally stuck and spectacularly bad at taking care of himself. He is a ghostwriter whose marriage is collapsing, whose poetry career has stalled, and whose response to stress appears to be more stress, preferably accompanied by cigarettes. The show is based on writer Hernán Casciari's real-life story, and that biographical origin matters because Ariel feels less like a television "type" than an actual human being who has wandered into the wrong genre.

This is a man American television would be tempted to "fix" before allowing him to be the romantic lead. Instead, The Best Heart Attack of My Life lets him remain gloriously, painfully himself.

The first episode establishes the wreckage. Ariel's wife Isabel (Eleanora Wexler) wants out. His boss gives him the thankless assignment of ghostwriting the biography of Augusto Briganti (Rafael Spregelburd), an obnoxious celebrity lawyer who regards himself as the King of Law. Ariel is under deadline, smoking like a chimney and eating as if his body were somebody else's problem. Then he sees Concha (Olivia Molina), a Spanish flamenco dancer, and becomes immediately fascinated with her.

Naturally, he invites her to Uruguay.

Because when your marriage is falling apart and your lifestyle resembles a slow-motion insurance claim, what you obviously need is a spontaneous trip to another country with a woman you've just met.

Concha agrees, and the second episode sends the pair to a rented house in Uruguay, where they meet Javier (Rogelio Gracia) and Alejandra (Romina Peluffo), the couple who will become unexpectedly important to Ariel's future.

Then comes the heart attack.

The show builds toward it with a wonderfully morbid countdown, tracking Ariel's dwindling heartbeats as though the universe has installed a cheap digital clock over his head. And when the attack finally comes, during his encounter with Concha, the series doesn't treat it as the end of Ariel's story. It is the beginning. Javier and Alejandra save him, and Ariel emerges from the hospital with the peculiar realization that the worst thing that ever happened to him may have been the thing that finally forced him to start living differently.

That premise could have produced the usual inspirational sludge: Man nearly dies, Man learns lesson, Man becomes New Man.

Fortunately, Ariel is too screwed up for that.

His transformation is gradual and uneven. He keeps writing Briganti's book from the hospital. He begins to recognize what his hosts have done for him. Eventually, the book succeeds, and Ariel starts using his newfound energy and creativity to help Javier and Alejandra. The miracle isn't that he becomes a completely different person. It's that he finally begins to understand the value of the person he already is.

And then there's Concha.

Their relationship is less conventional romance than collision. Ariel is drawn to her partly because she represents escape: from Isabel, from Buenos Aires, from his humiliating career, from the accumulated evidence that he has made a mess of his life. Concha, meanwhile, has her own cage. She dreams of becoming a flamenco dancer but is burdened by family expectations and the authority of her uncle, who became her guardian after her parents died and pressures her toward an arranged marriage.

So Ariel and Concha recognize something in each other before they really know each other: two adults trying to escape lives somebody else has designed for them.

That makes their eventual separation more affecting than a conventional romantic payoff would have been. Concha leaves Ariel a letter before departing, and later calls him, while Ariel proposes another trip that doesn't quite happen. Their relationship isn't presented as the prize Ariel wins after his heart attack. It's part of the disruption that makes transformation possible.

The series does have problems. Its middle episodes wander away from Ariel to concentrate on Javier and Alejandra, and the detour can feel like somebody changed the channel just when the story was getting interesting. But there is something stubbornly charming about the whole enterprise.

Because Ariel isn't a fantasy of a better man. He's a recognizable mess.

And that may be the show's real rebellion. The Best Heart Attack of My Life doesn't demand that its hero become more conventionally attractive, more successful or more Americanly "likable." It lets a fat, chain-smoking, emotionally confused, professionally mediocre guy occupy the center of the story and discover that his life is worth saving.

Not because he finally becomes somebody worth looking at.

Because he already was.

The Best Heart Attack Of My Life is now streaming in the United States on Hulu.