How about a reality series set in the HBO marketing department? I wouldn’t mind watching how those wacky promoters concoct ways to give just about anything the veneer of sophistication and class – even a sorry bunch like the Evangelistas, a Long Island family employed in the bail-bonds business and the subject of “Family Bonds,” the pay-cable channel’s latest Sunday night show.

It’s destined to be a hit, of course; at this point HBO can’t fail in its efforts to snare an audience of hip critics and demographically correct viewers, especially on Sunday nights. But when you watch “Family Bonds,” your patience for its pointlessness will be due more to the marketing of HBO’s stellar track record than to the content of this indulgent and repetitive reality series.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it turns out it’s duller, too. I’ve come to dread the medium’s fixation on “real” characters doing “real” things in front of television cameras as they count the minutes until their stardom affords them the celebrity they crave. It dates back to “The Osbournes,” and shows no signs of slowing down this season, as networks and cable channels plan to devote hours and hours to tracking the lives of dozens of Americans plucked from obscurity for us to chortle over. I’ve spared myself the agony of watching several such shows already, but the lure of an HBO series sucked me in; I watched the first few episodes of “Family Bonds” in the hope that intelligent folks who formulate HBO programming would have found a fresh spark to ignite my interest. They did not. “Family Bonds” is a show only a bail bondsman could love.

The Evangelistas hail from Medford, Long Island, and I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to think of them as just another American family, except that their income derives from pounding

on people’s doors in the middle of the night. They all seem a bit overly caffeinated and cantankerous – but wouldn’t you be if you not only had to track down fugitives for a living but had to make it look entertaining to a television camera tracking your every move? Someday a reality concept will come along that genuinely captures the way people behave when they don’t know they’re being filmed … oh, wait, that was “Candid Camera,” which made its television debut in August of 1948!

As reality-television families go, the Evangelistas rank among the most self-conscious in front of the camera; at times they look as though they might have changed professions purely for the opportunity of appearing on HBO. But they must feel royally ripped off, because the end result looks like a bad home movie shot by a cousin who got a digital-video camera for Christmas. In the first episode, parents Tom and Flo fight over how to teach their 7-year-old Frankie to ride a bike without training wheels. Yes, folks, it’s that exciting! Episode two takes us to Sal Evangelista’s 18th birthday party, and guess what? Things get out of hand! The jerky camera and grainy pictures – meant, of course, to lend an air of cinema verite to the proceedings – only remind us of the pleasures of television shot on high-quality film stock.

With “Sex and the City” gone and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” headed into its fifth season, HBO needs to find some new comedies to fill the gaping holes between seasons of “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under.” The last few

episodes of “Entourage” began to show some promise, but I don’t see how that show can ever overcome the fatal flaws of its cast; the charmless performances from its star, Adrian Grenier, and supporting actors Kevin Connolly (as Eric) and Jerry Ferrara (as Turtle) will forever outweigh the winning star turns of Kevin Dillon and Jeremy Piven. Maybe it’s unfair to place such a burden on HBO to deliver superior programming; shows as compelling and addictive as “The Sopranos” come along once a lifetime. But it’s a burden of expectations created as much by those marketing mavens at HBO as by the audience. Every time they tell us they’ve got a great new show for us to watch, we believe them. This time they promised us something “outrageous,” but the only thing outrageous about the Evangelistas on “Family Bonds” is that they’re on television at all.

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The debut of “Listen Up!” on CBS next Monday night accomplishes two important goals: it lends credence to the amusing theory of the “Seinfeld” curse, and proves that “Bob Patterson” wasn’t a fluke. This show should be canceled by the first commercial break. As a sportswriter modeled on The Washington Post’s Tony Kornheiser, Mr. Alexander’s character changes beats to write a column about his own life, thrusting his family into the spotlight in ways they don’t want. And we don’t want. There’s a shrillness here that reminds me of the Mr. Alexander’s later years on “Seinfeld,” when he started screaming his punch lines out of desperation, or Kramer envy.

The “Seinfeld” curse is real. It results from the greed that drives an actor to attach himself, for millions of dollars, to a second-rate script – and the jealousy Mr. Seinfeld’s co-stars must have felt when they saw him walk away with a nine-figure payday when “Seinfeld” sold into syndication. Michael Richards, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Mr. Alexander have each been guilty of signing mega-million-dollar deals with networks in the absence of a good script or a smart idea. Together they’ve wasted tens of millions of network dollars and contributed to the decline of the network sitcom. For that, they deserve to be cursed.