LOS ANGELES — Young adult stories come in every imaginable flavor, and flavor combination, and several are present in “Phony,” premiering Tuesday on Hulu. Based on the four episodes (of eight) out for review, I am all in with this show, but as Doris Day so memorably sang, the future’s not ours to see.

Created and directed in part by Nick Paley (“Marcel the Shell With Shoes On”), it’s a mystery driven by an uncanny event, with the beating heart of a high school dramedy, in the sense that what is dramatic about adolescence is at the same time comical. (Given time.) Temperamentally, it’s closer to “Freaks & Geeks” or “Dazed and Confused” than, say, “Stranger Things,” but I also wrote “Robert Altman” in my notes.

To begin, we are in some mountainous slice of small-town Pacific Northwest, where the Canadian tax breaks call American producers across the 49th parallel and the landscape presses in from all sides. (A reference to Lewis & Clark College suggests the story is set in Oregon, but I can’t remember any other clues; also, it isn’t important.) It’s an ordinary world wrapped in mystery and sometimes mist, but it’s the ordinariness that gives the show its power as much as, or more than, the mysteriousness.

Sonny Cooke (Sam Nivola, from the third season of “White Lotus” ) attends Delby High, where his mother, Ellen (Connie Britton), is the principal. This would be a nightmare for many teens, but for Sonny and Ellen, it’s more of a dream, as the two are unusually (which is not to say perversely) close. (There is no father in the picture, nor is one even mentioned.) He operates in the corridors as a kind of unofficial lieutenant to his mother, bringing cheer and care to his fellow students, spreading sunshine all over the place. This is a little strange, but he is not accounted a weirdo.

He has a nice girlfriend, Chloe (Mahaela Park), with whom he has just “decided to be official”; Ellen clucks at this — she’s a little protective. Sonny and Chloe call each other “Bobo,” and in a nice, authentic touch we see he has written that nickname in ballpoint pen on the white sidewall of his sneaker. As we open, Sonny and Chloe are planning to have sex for the first time; there is some comedy written around this. He’s the less mature, more nervous party. (He also has a tendency to fall over and bump into things.) His best friend, Vogel (Maliq Johnson), an injured basketball player, is miffed that he had to hear about this from Chloe and not Sonny, but not seriously and only for a moment.

Driving to meet Chloe for their Big Night, after a rare argument with his mother, Sonny swerves to avoid a downed tree and drives into Bucket Pond, where an official sign commemorates the many deaths that have occurred there. When he wakes from a coma a week later, he doesn’t recognize Ellen, and you won’t quite either. However it’s been accomplished, by makeup (or an absence of makeup), prosthetics, digital manipulation, hypnosis or some combination of the above — and by acting, of course — this alteration of Connie Britton, a face we know well, is just enough off to be incredibly creepy. (What have you done with Connie Britton? we want to ask.) There is nothing more frightening than when the familiar starts acting strange, in movies or in life. Sonny’s symptoms mirror an actual condition, Capgras syndrome, which no one here mentions, though to be fair, he hasn’t told anyone who might offer that diagnosis, and is too freaked out to look it up himself. Only Sonny and the viewer notice the difference, which suggests that he may be wrong, or, alternatively, that everyone else is.

Completing a not-quite Scooby Gang are Mallory (Grace Brennan), returning to public school after three years of homeschooling, and her cousin Weldon (Colter Lee), a deadpan original turn on the nerd. Sonny and Mallory shared a kiss once, on a class camping trip, but for … reasons, they meet again on tentative terms. Despite or perhaps because of her offbeat upbringing (religious parents), Mallory is the embodiment of the cool girl who doesn’t need to demonstrate how cool she is, and perhaps doesn’t even know or, more to the point, care. In a series thoroughly well cast (by Jessica Kelly and Lisa Parasyn), Lee and Brennan, especially, stand out as originals, their performances drawn from life, or some private corner of their imagination.

Weldon, who is ready to credit Sonny’s story — he believes, for example, that Avril Lavigne died and was replaced by “someone named Melissa, who has a clubfoot” — connects him with Sharla (Meera Syal), a private investigator he knows from an online forum. “She’s into alternative knowledge. So cryptids, One World Order, face peelers…”

“I know what it’s like to be called crazy,” says Sharla, “but all you really need is one person to believe you.”

“Or two people,” adds Weldon.

“Yep, two people. Two weird people.”

Much of what makes “Phony” special happens alongside the main plot, or doesn’t involve any plot at all — it’s pure atmosphere, bits of background business and chatter in the school halls, and at a party in the woods that occupies much of Episode 4. (Nice use of long lenses by cinematographer Andy Rydzewski.) Party scenes are a yardstick by which I measure the authenticity of a teenage movie — are these characters acting their age, or have they been designed to?

With only four episodes available for review, and nothing revealed, it’s impossible to say where the show is going — is it science fiction, or fantasy, or some super-complicated conspiracy, though why such a thing would be constructed around these people is beyond me. There’s a chance it’ll be brilliant, a chance it’ll be less than brilliant, and a greater than zero chance it’ll be dumb, but given the résumés of the co-showrunners Paley and Anthony King — whose credits include “Search Party,” “The Afterparty” and “Broad City”— I expect it to be interesting. Everything so far is so well done, I don’t mind how it ends; I don’t want it to end at all.

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