What if sitcom couple Rob and Laura (or Samantha and Darren) found themselves in the Village from The Prisoner?

This surreal take on Nick at Nite classic sitcoms seems to be the over-arching theme in WandaVision, the first new content Marvel has released since 2019’s Spider-Man: Far from Home. The first two episodes dropped on Friday; the rest of the nine episode run will be released weekly from here on out. The show streams on Disney+.

With only two episodes to go on, there’s not much to conclude about the sitcom with an edge – yet. In the first two episodes, both in black and white, Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) aka The Scarlet Witch from the Avengers movies and Vision (Paul Bettany) are newlyweds move into their idyllic suburban neighborhood and try to fit in with the humanoids as best they can.

In the first episode, Vision and Wanda are more or less Rob and Laura Petrie (albeit with superpowers) from The Dick Van Dyke Show, and in the second, they have somehow transformed into Samantha and Darren from Bewitched.

In each case the superhuman two try to pass as a stereotypically ordinary couple; they only just manage to do so. Behind – and sometimes beneath – that façade of normality, something strange is lurking – something that Wanda is trying very hard not to see.

In the Avengers movie timeline, Vision is dead, killed by Thanos while his lover, the Scarlet Witch was powerless to save him. So far it’s not possible to tell if this timeline takes place before or after that one, but this show is supposedly Marvel’s run-up to the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness movie.

The sitcom parodies are themselves not terribly funny, for all that the production feels innovative. The stories are the standard tropes like marital miscommunications, and savvy wives who have to save their dopey husbands from themselves. While this is obviously intentional, this isn’t what makes the show watchable. Filmed in front of a live studio audience, there are plenty of intrusive guffaws to tell you when something is meant to be funny.

Each episode has opening credits and a theme song that should be familiar to anyone who watched classic sitcoms, and the guest cast migrates with them from setting to setting. Emma Caulfield Ford (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Kathryn Hahn (Transparent) and many others play co-workers and neighbors of Wanda and Vision, each turning up multiple times.

Silly tropes and blatant parodies are beside the point here, however. In this show, the mystery is the thing that will keep you tuning in. Something sinister or heart-breaking (or both) is happening here, and you will want to find out what that is.