Kenya Barris’ decision to end the second season of black-ish with a loving spoof of Norman Lear’s ground-breaking inner-city comedy Good Times wasn’t just a great idea, it was a much-deserved victory lap.

With a remarkable second season that managed such incendiary topics as the n-word, gun ownership, police brutality and religion with great humor and humanity, black-ish has joined the Lear-led pantheon of socially significant comedies.

Black-ish isn’t just a modern and upscale answer to Good Times; it’s a modern melding of Good Times with All in the Family.

So it’s important to remember the conniption fit black-ish caused well before its premiere in 2014 when no one knew what to think of that title. Many black Americans were immediately offended (what’s with the “-ish”?), many white Americans were immediately outraged (“How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled Blackish?” tweeted Donald Trump. “Can you imagine the furor of a show, Whiteish! Racism at highest level?”) Petitions were circulated, essays written, boycotts called for, and white television critics (which is to say most television critics including me) bit their nails and hoped for the best.

Which, frankly, they didn’t get, at least not at first. Comedy pilots are notoriously difficult; even the most beloved and critically acclaimed series take time, often entire seasons, to find their rhythm and black-ish was no exception. Barris’ widespread declaration that he wanted to write a show about a black family as opposed to a family that just happened to be black seemed initially bogged down by the broad goofiness of Dad/Dre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) as he worried that his kids weren’t “black enough” and poked fun at his biracial, and far more sensible, wife Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross).

But Dre grew on you and so did black-ish. By the end of the first season it was a solidly funny, smart comedy with a strong multigenerational cast, including Laurence Fishburne, Anna Deavere Smith and Jenifer Lewis, that dealt with all sorts of issues through the eyes of a modern black family.

Then season two opened with an episode called “The Word” in which 6-year old Jack Johnson (Miles Brown) is suspended for using the n-word while performing the explicit version of the Kanye West hit Gold Digger. As the family engaged in a hilarious and deceptively sophisticated debate over who can and cannot use the word — Rainbow was, for example, behind the school’s zero-tolerance policy — it became clear that black-ish had found its footing.

The 22 episodes that followed were a well-paced mix of silly and serious, universal and specific. The Johnsons debated the wisdom of owning a gun and going to church, dealt with Halloween traditions and a college campus visit, reviewed their spending habits and definition of “spoiled.” Deftly using flashbacks to Dre and Rainbow’s very different childhoods, black-ish often addresses class as much as race.