Part of what makes television so interesting is how its executives try to anticipate the way our heart works. New shows are supposed to reflect (and take advantage of) our fickle tastes by presenting us with concepts we’ll embrace like a new lover; the idea is to engage us with characters and stories that we’ll allow to live inside our emotions for years, in a kind of marriage. It’s not surprising how rarely a new show comes along that works on that level. That failure has become a major factor in the evolution of the “reality” show – a short-run TV concept that gives us the chance to connect quickly with a plot line, the way we might a summer-camp romance we know is going to end when the bus comes to take us home.

The networks have, as usual, littered their latest schedules with summer reality flings. But the more they do so, the likelier it has become that the viewer will remain faithful to the show that brought her to the dance. Already, the detritus of concepts like Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen” has cluttered the landscape, and audiences are rejecting new suitors almost as quickly as the networks can develop them. They prefer, instead, the shows that embrace competition – limited-run series like “Dancing With the Stars” on ABC, which has become a hit because its dramatic arc depends on talent assessment, not personal rejection. It’s not hard to imagine how the fantasy of spinning across a dance floor with the elegant John O’Hurley (and winning a prize) could have more appeal than having a British chef shove a plate of food at your shirt in disgust.

We are now supposed to believe that ABC has cancelled its latest reality entry, “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” because of complaints from civil rights groups, but I don’t buy it. The ABC executives who signed the series knew exactly what they were doing when they scheduled it to debut this coming Sunday night; like all these concepts, the idea was to attract a bit of opening-night outrage followed by a burst of obsessive addiction. The premise – that seven families from different ethnic, racial, and social backgrounds would compete for the chance to live in luxury alongside some God-fearing Texas Republicans on a squeaky-clean culde-sac – wasn’t any more offensive than “Fear Factor,” and in fact bore some resemblance to the long-running NBC show about bugs and snakes. Both deal squarely with the notion of dangerous encroachments on our personal space.

As it turns out, “Welcome to the Neighborhood” was a fairly entertaining social experiment in the value – and danger – of first impressions in a society ruled by them. It’s TV’s answer to the best-selling Malcolm Gladwell book “Blink,” and its notion that we form our best conclusions in an instant. Its three “host” families served as judges, and the show let us listen to their deconstructions of the contestants as they sat on a back porch and sipped wine. That’s where they allowed themselves the chance to be truly honest and complain that they couldn’t bear their children to grow up alongside a gay white couple and their adopted black baby, or the overbearing family of “Mexicans,” as they called one, or the Satan-fearing Wiccan priestess who met her husband at an initiation rite. The self-appointed “governor” of the block, Jim Stewart, an overweight bundle of intolerance, set the tone immediately by muttering “Oh my God …” at the sight of everyone whose skin tone or sexual orientation didn’t match his own.

What was supposed to make “Welcome to the Neighborhood” acceptable was the evolution of their thinking. By the end of the first episode, it turned out that the family of tattoo artists with their wacky hairdos and hippie clothes were George Bush Republicans, teaching the neighbors a thing or two about their narrow-minded assumptions. And midway through episode two we learned that the Morgans – the single lily-white family in the bunch – harbored the tragic secret that Mom makes a living as a stripper. With each revelation came a new round of head-scratching, as the decision-makers had to re-process their assumptions to accommodate their newfound information. Tossed into the mix were “Apprentice”-style competitions that pitted the families against one another to gain immunity from judgment; each week, one family could earn temporary freedom from the wrath of their narrow-minded future neighbors.

It speaks to the wrongheaded priorities of civil rights groups that they’d bother to object to “Welcome to the Neighborhood.” At least these three finicky families force themselves to interact with others and regularly measure their changing perceptions. Shouldn’t activists be more concerned with the reality of racism than the phoniness of “reality” TV? Had they been reading the paper last week, they would have seen stories about how the Writers Guild of America is fighting for the rights of reality TV writers. They’re the folks who script the pseudo-reality that has been given this false moniker by an industry beholden to glib, shorthand definitions of itself. There’s nothing real about “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” not even its cancellation by ABC – an act of phony outrage by a network that probably figured it could get more publicity by junking the show than airing it.

And it worked.

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The one reality show to watch in the coming weeks wasn’t made available for review. It’s called “Rock Star: INXS,” and it’s from the television equivalent of Kellogg’s – Mark Burnett, the creator of “Survivor.” making its debut on CBS next Monday night at 9 p.m., it is a battle among 15 would-be rockers for the chance to join the band INXS, which has an opening for a lead singer. In the movie business, not allowing critics to attend advance screenings is an admission of fear; in television, it’s an act of supreme confidence and a sign of sure success.