Enthusiasm for One Partner in HBO Duo

HBO’s comedy topic tonight is married men.

Its new series, “The Mind of the Married Man,” is mindless, ironically, to say nothing of humorless and raw while striving to be the machismo equivalent of HBO’s quite witty, quite wise, quite wonderful “Sex and the City.”

Yet the returning comedy that follows tonight, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is as funny and seductively bent and neurotic as last season, with “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David again unfulfilled and miserable as himself, his wealth bringing him no peace, his outrage over minutiae--from Cobb salads to cashmere sweaters--causing problem after epic problem. If only his wife, Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), and others would quit the nagging and let him continue doing what he wants to do, what he was born to do, what he enjoys doing most, what he must do if he is to remain vibrant and alive.

Nothing.

Didn’t he earn the right, getting rich and respected as the creative juice behind America’s most beloved TV comedy about nothing?

Tonight, after he and Cheryl pay cash for a mansion on the ocean, David finally buckles and returns to work. Writing comedy? Get serious. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, he becomes a car salesman, an exciting career move naturally doomed to failure. Meanwhile, David crosses paths again with “Seinfeld” co-stars Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as themselves, and well, things just don’t go smoothly.

Richard Lewis returns as himself, and Jeff Garlin as David’s manager in a series whose loping rhythms and improv tone are distinctive, and its writing often a sophisticated howl. As in David’s shouting match outside a theater when accused of being a self-loathing Jew for humming Wagner.

“The Mind of the Married Man” is about something, by the way. It’s about orgasms and male whining, which would suffice were its payoff even a few laughs instead of 100% libido and raunch as it follows three married guys who work for the same Chicago newspaper and gab continually about sex.

Lead character Mickey Barnes is played by Mike Binder, who created the series and wrote and directed some of the episodes, including tonight’s premiere that finds him in a lather after his wife, Donna (Sonya Walger), discovers porn on his computer. The sex here is rather graphic for mainstream TV comedy, but no more so than “Sex and the City.”

Meanwhile, Mickey has round-the-clock sexual fantasies about his new assistant, Missy (Ivana Milicevic), and his married pals surface regularly with advice and adventures of their own. Monogamous Doug (Taylor Nichols) loans Mickey sex-instruction tapes, and the offensively facile Jake (Jake Weber) gets serviced in his office, almost hourly it seems, by the paper’s entertainment reporter and various other females, his philandering a big joke.

A lowercase problem here is the casting. Binder and Nichols are about the same size and look a lot alike at mid-range, as do their blond wives, causing confusion. More fundamentally, the minds of these one-notes are just not funny.

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“The Mind of the Married Man” premieres tonight at 10 on HBO; “Curb Your Enthusiasm” follows at 10:30 p.m., before the shows move into their regular time slots Sunday nights at 10 and 10:30, respectively. The network has rated both TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).