Tomorrow night the Sundance Channel will air the first episode of “Architecture School,” a six-part miniseries that follows the undergraduates at Tulane University’s URBANbuild program as they design and construct a house in a blighted New Orleans neighborhood. It’s a winning idea, part “Real World,” part “Paper Chase,” but with cantilevers and concrete trucks.

But ultimately the series is more “This Old House” than “Fountainhead,” and fixates on the “build” part of design-build, fashionably known as “D-B,” the soup-to-nuts process in which the architects and construction crew are one and the same. Maybe sawing, hammering, and a time-lapse construction site make for better television than watching sleep-deprived students stare at their computers, but the filmmakers Michael Selditch and Stan Bertheaud could have put more of an effort into making the architecture studio come alive.

Instead, the first semester is crisp and essentially agony-free as URBANbuild professor Byron Mouton shepherds the students through the design process. “I want innovation, affordability, and a really bold gesture,” he says, later citing the Guggenheim Museum, by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Salk Institute, by Louis I. Kahn. These two masterpieces of monumental architecture were designed for legacy-minded clients with bulky egos and deep pockets, so to use them as examples is a little like assigning a five-page short story to a creative writing class, then telling the students to expand on the examples of Jorge Luis Borges and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Lauren Anderson, the even-keeled director of Neighborhood Housing Services, the nonprofit group that provides the capital and land for the houses, then sells them to deserving (and subsidized) families, has something else in mind. “What I want is three bedrooms, two baths, in a 1,200-square-foot house,” she says. Ms. Anderson explains that her average client is a single working mother who makes $33,000 a year, such as the woman who comes in for financial counseling and says she spends $1,300 every month in rent, and who has less than $20 in savings.

Those aren’t exactly the finances of a Guggenheim, though they’re enough to pay for the mortgage of a house a few blocks away from St. Charles Avenue in Central City, an impoverished part of New Orleans only lightly touched by Hurricane Katrina but a socioeconomic catastrophe long before the levees failed. The URBANbuild project is just one street away from the house built the previous year, a graceful two-story structure with soaring windows on a street where most panes of glass are protected by iron bars. The potential buyers who come to see it are a subplot. There’s the enthusiast, the skeptic, the neighbor, and the carpetbagger, but the house remains unsold even as the new one is being built: It’s too much architecture for the neighborhood.

And it’s too much for the series to take on. “Architecture School” has the unfortunate habit of veering away from meaningful debates, even one as central as the issue of what constitutes good design. The only stern words are spoken by Reed Kroloff, the dean of Tulane’s school of architecture, who verbally dismantles several projects during the final presentation. Nobody is spared, including Amarit, a capable student who, through the cues of reality television, had been the anointed leader.

Mr. Kroloff has the eyewear of a great architect, but ultimately his opinions count for little. URBANbuild is too earnest to leave the selection to professionals like Mr. Kroloff or Mr. Mouton, or even to pragmatic Ms. Anderson, the client. Instead, the students sit around a table and vote for the winner in a show of hands, and even if they chose the best project it feels less like a deliberation than a “Brady Bunch” family meeting.

Then it’s four episodes of construction. Some students disappear with little explanation, among them Chris, a genial rock climber from Georgia, while others appear, such as burly Ian, whose experience as a contractor is matched only by his capacity to curse. Ian, of course, is likable. So is Nik, a broad-shouldered frat boy who seems to think putting on a tool belt necessitates pulling off his shirt. In fact, everybody is likable, from Adriana and her plummy Trinidadian accent to thoughtful Alex. Mr. Kroloff, who so far has the only conscientiously critical voice in the series, turns into a cheerleader when he sees the finished house, and even Tess, a strong-minded neighbor with an outsize personality (and a good reason to mistrust URBANbuild), offers smiles and hugs in the final episode. The only unlikable thing on screen is Amarit’s hair, which looks great in the fall semester as a shaggy mane but doesn’t fare so well after a back-to-school buzz cut.

All this likability feels disingenuous, or at least superficial, and the fault lies with the filmmakers. They flirt with substance but refuse to take the advice Mr. Mouton gave his class and create something more innovative, “a really bold gesture.” This series isn’t about Harvard students building a painter’s studio in the Berkshires; it’s about Tulane students in inner-city New Orleans, which is to say it’s about poverty and race, urban fabric and architectural traditions, youthful hubris and the pressures of a university. “Architecture School” identifies every one of these issues, but it’s afraid to do anything with them.

Messrs. Selditch and Bertheaud mean well, but they do a disservice to New Orleans, which despite its nickname was never an easy city. But even if the storytelling is watered down, the story itself is worth watching. The stakes of “Architecture School” are low by television’s standards — there’s no million-dollar prize, no lucrative contract waiting — but they’re high by the standards of humanity, and stratospheric for the students, who deserved a series as thoughtful as the house they designed and built.