Loves me, loves me not

It’s a peculiarity of long-term relationships that a couple can have the same fight for years, even decades, an elaborate set piece they re-enact time and again, never missing a mark. The script alters slightly, the costuming shifts from tuxedos and dresses to pajamas, but the ritualistic wrangle at the core remains precisely the same.

That the ambitious ‘‘Tell Me You Love Me’’ turns this emotional redundancy into a TV series is both its great strength and its weakness. This unusual new HBO drama intently focuses on four relationships and their dark struggles, the unsolvable standoffs most series about love miss. ‘‘Tell Me You Love Me,’’ which premieres Sunday at 9, doesn’t contain any of TV’s typical distractions from pure emotional tension — no music, no glitz, no humor, and very little star power. On this Bergmanesque show, which coolly explores hidden passions and x discord, there are awkward silences aplenty.

‘‘Tell Me You Love Me,’’ created by Cynthia Mort, is already somewhat famous for its sexual content. The camera follows the characters’ sexual experiences from start to finish, without montage editing and with clear glimpses of genitalia. In TV-industry circles, the drama has been dubbed ‘‘The Sex Show.’’ And perhaps HBO doesn’t entirely mind the moniker, as the channel looks for post-‘‘Sopranos’’ attention and subscribers.

But after Sunday’s episode, when the actors at times seem actually to be having sex, the racy scenes aren’t the right and true focal point. We see fewer sexual encounters, and fewer sexual organs, and more talk. The show isn’t porn ‘‘with a story’’; it’s about the rigors of relationships, illustrated not only by dialogue but by sexual communication. One of the central theses of ‘‘Tell Me You Love Me’’ is that sex is microcosmic, that the epic story of a couple is written into their lovemaking — or, as in the case of David (Tim DeKay) and Katie (Ally Walker), their lack of lovemaking.

The lives of the four couples only tangentially intersect; each relationship is mostly shown apart from friendships, as well as from jobs and hobbies. The show’s biggest unifying plot device is that some of these people are in therapy with Dr. May Foster, played by Jane Alexander with all the Earth Mother nurturance that her character’s name implies. May is also in one of the four couples featured, although she and her husband, Arthur (David Selby), have the strongest of the marriages, with only one slip in their 43-year history. They get less screen time than the others, because they’re the happiest.

The most compelling and fraught relationship is that of David and Katie, who aren’t having sex on ‘‘The Sex Show.’’ We see these parents of two kiss goodnight affectionately, then fall into their respective loneliness and distance. In the third episode, they’re the subjects of one of the show’s most subtly excruciating scenes. Their 10-year-old daughter, perhaps unconsciously aware of her parents’ sexless marriage, has pushed David into buying Katie lingerie for their anniversary. And then at the anniversary dinner, she pushes Katie into opening the gift. David and Katie’s discomfort is painful, particularly since they brought the children to the dinner to avoid any hint of anniversary romance.

When Katie suggests couples therapy to David, he shuts down completely: ‘‘You really want to do that?’’ he says. ‘‘Turn us into a couple with problems?’’ Ironic lines such as those — Katie and David are already a couple with problems — are what give ‘‘Tell Me You Love Me’’ its psychological layers. The characters project so much more than they mean to.

The show’s youngest couple, Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby) and Jamie (Michelle Borth), are engaged, but Jamie refuses to accept Hugo’s fidelity. She is profoundly invested in seeing him as duplicitous, and she tells Hugo she knows he doesn’t want to be monogamous: ‘‘You’re not saying it, but that’s what you’re saying.’’ His denials fall on deaf ears.

Indeed, all of these couples have trouble hearing each other, even while their miscommunications are resounding to us. Palek (Adam Scott) and Carolyn (Sonya Walger, Penny on ‘‘Lost’’) aren’t shy about voicing their complaints, like David and Katie, but they simply don’t listen to anything that doesn’t confirm their own feelings. As Carolyn becomes increasingly fixated on getting pregnant, and Palek feels like an outsider, a sperm bank, the gulf broadens between them.

The couples are ordinary, and so are their issues. That’s part of the goal of the show — to dissect the mundanity of love and anger. But making a developing story out of these tangles and skirmishes is extremely difficult, and ‘‘Tell Me You Love Me’’ doesn’t quite pull it off. Even with the strong work of nuanced writers including Anya Epstein from ‘‘Homicide,’’ and standout performances from Walker and DeKay, who are perfectly alone together, the show feels inert. There’s not much promise of a plot arc, so much as the repeating rhythm of conflict among intellectual and well-to-do white people.

If ‘‘Tell Me You Love Me’’ were a movie or a miniseries like Bergman’s ‘‘Scenes From a Marriage,’’ its static, stark snapshot of coupledom might be more valuable. But as an ongoing series, it runs the risk of playing out like a broken record.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.