Whereas Kanye West once kept his distance from “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” the show now seems to be in the midst of a full-fledged image-rehabilitation campaign. Photograph by Desmond Boylan / AP

“I don’t really do her show,” Kanye West said in a 2013 radio interview, seated next to his wife, Kim Kardashian. He was explaining his absence from “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” the E! Network reality-TV show that Kardashian and her clan have starred in for nearly a decade. As a matter of taste and principle, he says—just Kanye being Kanye—he has kept his distance from the show’s gaudy, oversaturated aesthetic and contrived plotlines. Apart from a few memorable appearances over the years (the one where he combed through Kim’s closet and discarded items he found distasteful; the one where he proposed to her in a baseball stadium), he has mostly acted as a phantom presence on the series. When the Kardashians stage their epic family vacations, Kanye has kept out of frame and out of the conversation. When Kim talked about moving out of her mother’s house, where she and her family have lived for many years, Kanye was M.I.A., as were the pair’s two children. Kim and Kanye’s fascination as a couple has always been connected to their diametrically opposed approaches to über-fame: Kardashian, and her show, are part of a tightly controlled machine oiled by pleasantry and self-control; West, on the other hand, is a publicist’s nightmare, someone who has fashioned himself as the poster child of truth-telling. His absence from “Keeping Up” has worked as a subliminal reminder to viewers that his class of celebrity is separate from the Kardashians’, the life of an artist more sacred than that of a professional famous person.

But lately this pattern has shifted. Last month, as Kardashian took to Snapchat to knock Taylor Swift off her pedestal—airing a recorded phone conversation between Swift and West in which Swift seemingly approves a controversial lyric in West’s song “Famous” (“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex”)—“Keeping Up with the Kardashians” was simultaneously undertaking a full-fledged Kanye image-rehabilitation campaign.* In a span of one season, West has done what once seemed inconceivable: he’s gone from a disembodied figure to a visible presence and, finally, an actual character on the show. (He still refuses to provide any confessional-booth-style commentary.) His extravagant fashion show and album-release party at Madison Square Garden took up an entire episode, in May. A few weeks later, the show travelled to Iceland, where West was shooting a video for the song “Highlights.” There, he and Kim got into a minor tiff because she neglected him in favor of her sister Kourtney; they quickly made up and moved on. It seemed like an expertly staged attempt to underscore the strength and intimacy of one of the world’s most scrutinized marriages. Later, as she geared up to leak the damning recording of Swift (a celebrity who typically maintains as tight control over her public image as Kim does), Kim took the opportunity to defend West to the entire world. “I’ll do whatever to protect my husband,” she said.

Kanye’s insertion into the televised world of the Kardashians has only grown stranger and more pronounced in the weeks since the Swift controversy faded away. Recent episodes feature the family’s trip to Cuba, where the creators of the show (among them Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian, who are both credited as executive producers) go to great lengths to humanize West. He is pictured in happy-dad mode, taking selfie videos and stoking the excitement of his daughter in the back of a pink convertible. “Are you going to grow up to be an artist?” he asks her in a museum. He is pictured in quintessential Kanye mode, describing all the colors he sees in Havana as “very Yeezy.” He is pictured in mad-genius mode, urgently constructing a set of skirts for his wife and daughter before they take a local dance class. At one point, Kardashian painstakingly explains how celebrity-brand partnerships—which have been a hot-button topic for West in recent years—are supposed to operate. During one dinner scene, we are introduced to a young filmmaker who has been travelling with the Kardashians under West’s tutelage; he takes grainy, arty footage of the family for a planned documentary. Some of this footage is spliced into the episode, prompting the viewer to imagine for a moment what surreal, incredible thing the show could be if West truly got his hands on it. Crucially, West is gentle and lovable and palpably human in each scene.

During the Cuba episode, there is one narrative thread, in particular, that feels sneakily crafted to shape perceptions of West. It begins when he and Kourtney are discussing the recent Met Gala, where West arrived in a set of ice-blue-colored contacts. Kourtney asks West in a syrupy-sweet voice, “Did you like your color contacts?” West does not know how to field the question, and he appears exasperated. He refuses to answer her, which makes him seem a little nuts at first. Later, in the car with Kourtney and Kim, West asks his daughter North, “Do you like your little diamonds in your ears?” and is struck by the realization that Kourtney had been speaking to him in exactly the same tone. The group eventually comes to an understanding about the exchange. “I literally woke up in the middle of the night,” Kourtney says, in a kind of mea culpa, “and I realized, that’s how I talk to kids.” Here is a Kardashian implicating herself in a pattern of behavior that has plagued West’s career for years: she is treating a grown black man, one of the most successful and influential artists in history, like a tantrum-prone child. She’s doing the same thing that interviewers like Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Lauer have been doing for years, bringing him on their television shows and addressing him in condescending tones, then treating him like an insane person for being riled by it. The scenes in “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” don’t make an explicit connection to race, or to West’s knotty dynamic with the public, but they do cannily show how easy it is for people—even a Kardashian, his own sister-in-law—to misunderstand West and treat him unfairly.

Part of what makes West such an exhilarating entertainer is that he lives in a never-ending cycle of self-sabotage and rebirth. (“Soon as they like you / Make ’em unlike you / Cuz kissing people’s ass is so unlike you,” he rapped in the song “I Am a God.”) Before he was fully drawn into the world of the Kardashians, he was responsible for propelling and enduring this cycle himself. He would blunder, retreat, repent, blunder, retreat, repent. Kim’s Snapchat offensive, along with the recent storylines on “Keeping Up,” have shown that the Kardashians are less willing than West is to wait for the passage of time or a new album to smooth out the lumps. It was once believed that West had given the Kardashians an essential makeover, providing the entire family with the kind of cultural cachet necessary to elevate it from the slums of reality television. Now the dynamic has been inverted: Kim Kardashian is a wife, a mogul, a star, and, increasingly, the steward of one of the world’s most complicated images.

*This post has been updated to clarify that Taylor Swift never approved the lyric “I made that bitch famous” from Kanye West’s song “Famous.”__