If only “Everybody Hates Mary” lived up to its clever title and delivered some genuine entertainment along with the wry, ironic sensibility it strives for, I’d be ready to declare it the future of television. It airs every Friday evening at 6 p.m. on Channel 54, one of four channels belonging to any citizen of Manhattan with a video camera and a dream. Time Warner Cable provides these channels – through the auspices of an organization called the Manhattan Neighborhood Network – as a sort of penance for its disfigurement of the urban subterranean landscape. And people like Noam and Mary, the young, married couple who host the live, weekly series, can take advantage of this spot on the cable lineup to present just about anything they want, so long as it isn’t obscene. In doing so they reach a potential audience of about 600,000 New Yorkers. That’s more people than ever watched “McEnroe” on CNBC.

There’s a certain perverse charm to “Everybody Hates Mary,” and it’s worth a look. There’s no premise to speak of; the show opens with a lavish (by public-access standards, anyway) opening-credits sequence that includes shots of Mary photocopying her face, Noam lecturing at a symposium for men, and a lot of frenetic running-around that launches the enterprise each week with a substantial energy burst. Right away we realize that while Mary might be the show’s ostensible focus, it’s her marriage to Noam that elevates the enterprise to something vaguely substantial. The couple typically presents themselves in front of a stationery camera at the show’s opening, and proceeds to chit-chat with each other and whoever happens to call in. They try to set up a topic for conversation with the callers; one week they attempted to address the relative taste of barbecued chicken wings or nachos. Last Friday night, Noam presented this proposed truism as a subject for discussion: “Any woman who looks like Paris Hilton,” he declared, “is a slut.”

Unfortunately, the level of discourse on “Everybody Hates Mary” is a notch or two below that of Charlie Rose. Or, for that matter, Charlie Brown. Callers often prefer to shift the topics away from Noam’s suggestions to, say, a disquisition on their favorite obscenities. On last Friday’s show, three callers managed to spew their venom at Noam and Mary with a variety of curses, prompting Noam to furrow his brow, cut them off and, in one case, offer up his own derogatory term for a caller. Frequently, callers also suffer from that age-old inability to step away from their television sets, causing a huge, annoying, high-pitched sound guaranteed to drive away all but the show’s most loyal fans.

But “Everybody Hates Mary” doesn’t limit its content to calls from crazies. It offers up odd, interstitial material designed to amuse. One regular feature, called “An Unremarkable Scene Between Two People” (introduced by an out-of-tune Mary singing those words while strumming her guitar), features Noam and Mary in disguises, discussing matters as mundane as their shopping list. “Do we need milk?” Mary asks Noam in a disturbingly dull manner. On last Friday’s show, Mary also diverted viewers with her recollections of a “celebrity” encounter with Oliver Platt. It seems that Mary was walking down the street one way, and the actor – who only in the world of Manhattan cable could be construed as a genuine celebrity – was walking the other way. Such are the voyeuristic thrills of “Everybody Hates Mary.” Far more entertaining was the brief video shown of raw meat getting unloaded at Peter Luger’s restaurant in Williamsburg.

Still, there’s something strangely captivating about this show. Maybe it’s the entertaining notion of random New Yorkers getting access to my TV set; if I had the time, I’d probably waste hours every week watching public access in search of quality shows. And while I personally agree with the show’s title and find Mary an appropriately hateful personality, I find Noam kind of charming in an Albert Brooksian way; I wouldn’t be stunned if some enterprising casting agent took a liking to Noam and got him a real job on a sitcom. He’s got a telegenic face and a sweet, honest smile. The fact that he loves Mary shouldn’t get in the way of his career – but maybe he should tell the world his last name, if he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life on channel 54.

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Over the weekend I happened to revisit “Quiz Show,” Robert Redford’s wonderful 1994 recounting of the “Twenty-One” scandal of the late 1950s, in which whiz kid Charles Van Doren was found to have been fed the answers to questions on the popular game show. I’d forgotten one key plot point that struck me as relevant to recent events. Van Doren’s predecessor on the show, a nebbishy Queens brainiac named Herbert Stempel, had been told to take a dive by the show’s producers after his own 17-week run of wins. Stempel had been specifically instructed to give the wrong answer (“On the Waterfront”) to the question, “What won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1955?”The correct answer, of course, was “Marty,” which Stempel – and most of the show’s viewers – already knew. It would be more exciting for the audience, the producers explained to the angry Stempel, to see him finally lose with such an easy, obvious question.

Those events bring to mind the oddly similar dive taken by Ken Jennings last week on “Jeopardy,” when after amassing winnings of $2.5 million with a seemingly endless supply of arcane knowledge, he lost with a Stempel-style misfire. The man who could accurately recount the plot of the German epic poem “The Nibelungenlied” failed to correctly create a question around an absurdly simple answer: “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.” Mr. Jennings’s flagrantly wrong question (“What is FedEx?”) makes you wonder whether anything has really changed in television since the Van Doren days.