Carly Craig created “Sideswiped” with a simple, catchy premise: A single 35-year-old who is new to the dating scene drunkenly swipes right all night and matches with 252 guys on Tinder. She decides to date them all, but this isn’t just a show about her hookups. YouTube Premium’s new comedy is surprisingly family-focused.

“I didn’t want it to be a date of the week show,” Craig told International Business Times. “To me, I didn’t want it to be sitcom-y kind of funny. I wanted it to be real and personal and [include] things that I brought from my real life and other people that I know into the characters. … I think it makes it more relatable that people have relationships with their family that [audiences] can relate to on the show.”

Craig, who is pulling double-duty as co-showrunner and the leading lady, partially based the series on some real-life situations. She too was thrown back into the dating world after getting out of a 10-year-relationship.

“Once I started dating, the dating world even without the app is crazy, but adding the app to it, it’s just a different world that I found so interesting and wanted to write about,” she said. “And my mom was single in her 50s before that, and I really wanted to bring in that kind of generational ‘What it’s like to be starting over?’ [theme] at any age and how this digital world can kind of help you with that. So that’s how the idea sparked, and then it became this multi-generational comedy about relationships, whether it be romantic or also familial.”

Craig plays Olivia, the 35-year-old straight-laced businesswoman whose sister signs her up for the app. At 25, her sibling Jayne (Chelsea Frei) is already married with children and kind of bored. She invests a little too much interest in her sister’s new love life, but Olivia isn’t the only one dating. Their mother, Mary (Rosanna Arquette), is also playing the field after being widowed. She isn’t as independent as Olivia, though.

“My mom is super responsible, she’s independent. She does not live with me. She is remarried now,” Craig assures IBT of her real-life mother. “But [the ‘Sideswiped’ character] is more based on when she was dating years ago, like 15 years ago. It was a different relationship that we had.

“It kind of became like we were friends and I was sort of searching for that mom role still. I’m like, ‘But where’s the mom?’ And now she’s totally that, but there was a moment there where she was figuring out who she was as a newly single woman in her fifties and going on this journey at an older age and how scary that is and everything. … I found really interesting, and our journey to get through that to be where we are now is in such a great place, like now we’re really close.”

The fictional Mary isn’t what viewers would call “super responsible.” She’s obviously much more of a free-spirit, especially compared to her daughter. However, they’re both trying to figure out their lives.

“She’s never had a job, never been unmarried, she’s not independent and has to come live with me when her husband dies and is now starting over,” Craig explained. “But what’s great is we’re going to watch her like an 18-year-old going off to college or something, like her sort of becoming who she is at that age. And that’s pretty great, I think because it teaches you that at any age you can start over. It’s never too late.”

The multi-generational story is available now on YouTube Premium. The first two episodes of “Sideswiped” are available for free.

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