Welcome to His World. And Hers.

In Disney+’s “WandaVision,” sitcoms were a prison and a haven. The Avengers’ Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), wracked with grief over the death of her android husband, Vision (Paul Bettany), conjured him back to life on a sitcom set — a magical bubble constructed of made-for-TV happy memories.

“Kevin Can F**k Himself,” which just concluded its eight-episode first season on AMC and AMC+, is also a meta story about a sitcom wife. But in this case only the “prison” part applies.

Allison McRoberts (Annie Murphy) is a familiar TV type: the long-suffering wife to an immature lout. Her husband, Kevin (Eric Petersen), spends his days hatching schemes and perfecting his beer-pong game, secure in the childlike knowledge that his hot, competent mother-spouse will clean up his messes and kiss away his boo-boos while the studio audience roars with laughter.

A typical network sitcom expects the audience to laugh it up at all this. You can’t really blame him — boys will be boys! — and as for her, well, she’s a good sport and she gives as well as she gets. (When Kevin complains that being around his boss “is constant work,” Allison shoots back, “Ah, you say the same thing about shoes with laces.”)

But when Allison is away from Kevin, she is, literally, on a different sort of show. The audience laughter disappears, replaced by a stress-headache whine. The over-lit multicamera-sitcom sheen dims into gritty-cable-drama murk. Miserable and trapped, she makes a decision that’s more Walter White than Lucy Ricardo: Kevin must die.

“Kevin,” created by Valerie Armstrong, was none-too-subtly inspired by the likes of “Kevin Can Wait,” the two-season Kevin James sitcom on CBS. That aging-manchild comedy was so uninterested in its wife character that it killed her off between seasons because, James said, it was “running out of ideas.” In this light, Allison’s scheme is a kind of symbolic revenge killing.

In Armstrong’s feminist reimagining, every Kevin’s heaven is someone else’s hell. It may be TV’s most ingenious idea of the year, even if the execution has been mixed. The whole is an audacious experiment, made up of two parts that are all too conventional — one of them intentionally, the other perhaps less so.

The sitcom sections are a pitch-perfect imitation, from the rat-a-tat comedy beats to the ditsy subplots to the prime-time-raunchy punch lines. Petersen’s braying, uncanny man-child cartoon puts it all over; he’s like a Memoji Jackie Gleason.

The effect is a stunning re-creation of something you never thought someone would go to the trouble to re-create. It’s like watching someone rummage around in their home pantry and reproduce the precise formula for a Red Bull.

When Allison is away from Kevin, the series shifts to realism. Murphy, of the much lighter “Schitt’s Creek,” is convincing as a woman desperate to claw her way out of a maze. Even the show’s setting, Worcester, Mass., makes a convincing pivot. It’s a salt-of-the-earth cahs-and-bahs caricature in the sitcom sections, then dirties up nicely in the drama stretches as a glum badlands of opioids and resignation.

But as the murder plot stretches itself out — first Allison plans to arrange a drug overdose, then she hires a hit man — it runs through another string of commonplaces, ones that are more basic cable than network prime-time. There’s an affair subplot, a police detective who gets too close to the scheme, the standard dank visual palette that tells you that you’re watching serious TV. Every turn is well familiar from post-“Breaking Bad,” ordinary-person-goes-in-for-crime dramas like “Ozark” and “The Mosquito Coast.”

The season can also feel reluctant to engage with the implications of its premise, which is still about a murder plot, however much of a jackass Kevin is. Wouldn’t a divorce be easier? “Kevin” hand-waves the question.

Without the crime plot, of course, you don’t have a show. But the series misses an opportunity for the kind of challenging investigation that this kind of drama can do at its best: to cultivate genuine sympathy for Allison while wrestling with her actions as a complex character with moral agency.

Where the show becomes genuinely special is in the connections between its two parts. It’s disturbing to see Allison, desperately trying to gnaw her way out of her life, suddenly land in Kevin’s world, where his foibles are lovable, his toast always lands butter-side up and her frustration is a harmless running gag.

“Kevin” uses these transitions to underscore a power dynamic. We see Allison both in her story and Kevin’s, but we rarely see him in hers, except for fantasy sequences. When he enters a scene, the perspective shifts to multicamera and the laughing studio audience comes to life.

This dissonance, more than any creation of story or character, is the show’s accomplishment. The audience, which we for decades have unthinkingly heard as a kind of jolly viewer surrogate, is instead now a jeering conspirator, ratifying Kevin’s behavior and keeping Allison in her place.

As in “WandaVision,” the familiar world of the sitcom becomes a kind of dark magic, generated here not by a character but by all the social forces that keep Kevins bumbling and happy through life. “This whole world is designed for guys like Kevin!” Allison says.

It’s not only Allison who wakes up to this awareness. The show’s most interesting character arc involves her next-door neighbor Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden), who is initially a wisecracking foil who sees herself as one of the guys and Allison as a stuck-up prig. She eventually becomes Allison’s accomplice, at first seemingly out of curiosity, later because she realizes that Kevin and his pals treat her like a second-class crony. She has more in common with Allison than she may want to believe.

As the season goes on, the lines between the comedy and drama halves blur. After the hit job against Kevin fails, an unusual gravity lowers on the sitcom portion. And in the season’s final scene, Neil (Alex Bonifer), Kevin’s puppy-dog best friend and Patty’s brother, overhears Allison confessing to the murder plot. He confronts her, there’s a brief, violent struggle and Patty smashes a bottle over his head. As the glass breaks, the scene changes from Kevin-sitcom mode to Allison-drama mode.

“Kevin” is like that bottle; it will make us see the horror in what we’ve been trained to see as harmless, even if it has to smack us upside the head. It may be as subtle as a blow to the skull, but it’s an inventive meta-critique of TV. Here’s hoping it can eventually become great TV itself.