Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show is clearly in a league of its own. Yet what he’s created will upset you and make you deeply concerned for him.

The more you read “Reality Show” as self-obsession, the more likely you are to pull away. But if you watch it as a TV show, as a vulnerable story crafted by a master storyteller, the more likely you’ll be to come away with meaningful truths. Carmichael’s problem runs deep. But it’s easy to reach, so long as you’re willing to dig.

To dub the result a “reality show” undersells its artfulness and its subtle visual flourishes. The director Ari Katcher achieves a careful balance between naturalism and narrative coherence, and eschews the genre’s glossy direct-to-camera confessionals altogether; Carmichael’s inner thoughts are conveyed instead through snippets of borderline-diaristic standup. “Reality Show” can be tremendously moving, but it’s just as often funny in the way that life is funny.

“Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show” may not be a relatable treatise on what it means to come out, but it’s an indelible, candid-in-its-way snapshot of this coming out.

The show’s fly-on-the-wall intimacy – surely it will make some viewers uncomfortable — combined with Carmichael’s winning but deeply flawed nature makes this series a viewing experience that’s hard to tune out.

It’s hard to call Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show a “fun” or “conventionally enjoyable” show to watch, but I laughed and covered my eyes in mortification in equal measure — and since I finished my screeners, I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

It allows a viewer to feel devastated for Carmichael in one sequence while wanting to punt him into the stratosphere very shortly thereafter, and it invites both responses. But its strongest moments, and the most absorbing ones, are the show’s brief portraits of the friends and family around its central figure. It’s ostensibly about Jerrod Carmichael, but its most fascinating question is how well he can see those beyond himself.