Love it or hate it, The Whispers on ABC is upping the ante for network dramas, and we are so here for every second of it.

There are so many ways in which The Whispers has raised the bar for the typical network drama. While some shows are throwing the focus on love triangles and allowing the greater stakes to be overshadowed by one character’s emotional upheaval, The Whispers has managed to keep from allowing one character’s woes to outweigh the others.

They’ve also managed to top a nuclear meltdown in terms of the horrors Drill could unleash next, and you don’t even question that the stakes could possibly be that high.

Here are just a few of the ways that The Whispers is raising the bar:

1. Emotional drama, but not the central focus

While the emotions unleashed by the plot in The Whispers are wholly real and intense, they aren’t overdramatized. The show has managed to keep the focus on its biggest strength: the unknown enemy (who we’ll talk more about in a minute).

These parents and lovers scamper around trying to protect their children and interact peacefully with each other despite quite a bit of sordid history behind them, but the focus never shifts from the problem at hand. Claire, Wes, Sean, and Lena have a history fraught with complications, but since they have an invisible alien trying to use their kids for his own malevolent purposes, they keep their messy emotions in check for the most part.

2. A truly creepy villain you can’t see

Drill is one of a kind. Movies have played with the idea of an invisible villain, i.e. Hollow Man, and there have been all manner of bad guys that have been excellent at camouflage. But it’s new territory to have a villain that has a consciousness and can still manage to remain completely invisible to the human eye.

On top of that, you have a character that has the ability to communicate with children and uses electricity, a resource we definitely take for granted, to move around. Drill has changed two completely innocent and commonplace parts of our lives into threats everyone in the world of The Whispers must be wary of. And when the lights flicker in real life, we all should be on alert.

3. Complicated relationships inform the story without being the story

The complicated pasts of Wes, Claire, Sean, Lena, Jessup, and more inform the story without taking the focus off the creepy factor. Would the drama of Henry and Minx being in danger be as distressing if their parents didn’t have issues working together to stop Drill? Would we be as affected by Lena’s dedication to protecting Minx if we didn’t know that before this all started, she and Wes were mere steps away from parting ways? No. The interpersonal drama keeps the tension high and tight, making us all the more anxious to know what happens next.

4. The kid factor

The kids on this show do a fantastic job of not going over the top with their performances. It would be easy for the children that Drill has doing his bidding to come off as caricatures and be over the top evil. Instead, the directors and showrunners have driven home the innocent and trusting nature of these kids in a being they think is just a friend asking for help.

We have been so impressed with characters like Harper, Henry, and Minx that it’s hard to remember that the actors behind these kids are just kids themselves, playing a different kind of make believe.

5. It’s just different

The creepy factor on this show is just different from anything else on television. There have been scary shows hitting the screen for decades, including some of the newest hits, Teen Wolf, American Horror Story, and the dearly departed The Following (may it rest in peace), but nothing has hit on the creepiness factor that The Whispers has managed to wrangle week in and week out.

Whether Drill is luring Henry into a nuclear cooling tower under false pretences, or a little girl in a mask made with a paper plate has just drawn a syringe in a stuck elevator, chills are inevitable when watching The Whispers.

6. Raising the stakes to nuclear levels

In the fourth episode of the season, The Whispers threw a nuclear power plant into meltdown, gushing clouds of radioactive smoke into the atmosphere. It seemed that this was going to be the beginning of a long-term rise of panic and the public possibly learning about Drill, but as fast as the clouds burst from the plant, they disappeared like magic.

It proved just how powerful a villain these government agents were up against, and reminded us that no matter what else may be going on, as long as Drill is at large, there will always be a greater problem.

The Whispers has done more in its first season than some shows do in their whole run. There’s always some sort of improvement to be made, but when you walk away from a show week after week affected by the storytelling, it’s hard to believe that this little summer show about an invisible alien just make you shiver in fear. Lights flicker in reality and the fear instilled in us all from week after week of Drill announcing his presence via electricity has us shaking in our boots.

We can only continue to hope and pray that a second season is in the cards, but at least we know there are four more episodes of bone-chilling mystery left before we have to start worrying about if we’ll get more from The Whispers.