Showtime’s slimy and almost pointlessly sordid House of Lies asks us to find room in our cluttered collective conscience for yet another premium-cable ensemble drama (with comic undertones) about cold-hearted people who do horrible things, which in turn leaves them torturously self-absorbed.

Here, Don Cheadle stars as Marty Kaan, one of the country’s most successful and ruthless corporate consultants — those mysterious, well-dressed people who, with the flick of a jargon-larded PowerPoint, can upend the lives of everyone from the executive suite down to the cleaning staff, scorching business plans and revamping marketing initiatives as they go.

By day, Marty and his team are duplicitous, foul-mouthed, money-grubbing slime balls who jabber in biz-school code speak (“Let’s architect the journeyline into an end-state vision that we can leverage into an impactful deliverable”) and whose only focus is to land fatter paydays for the consulting firm. After hours, when all the real work gets done, they charge steak-dinner and strip-bar tabs to the client. They lure conniving junior executives into compromising situations in order beat them at their own game. From the show’s first moments we are immersed in a morally bankrupt sphere of kill-or-be-killed. The blunt subtext is that this is the reality of capitalist America. Up yours, in other words.

But just how much of that can a viewer take? You can’t make a TV show anymore unless everyone in it is an unctuously competitive, trash-talking deviant. Showtime alone asks us to empathize with a serial killer ( Dexter), a narcissistic sex addict ( Californication), one of history’s most sinister popes ( The Borgias), a drug-dealing mom ( Weeds), an adulterous nurse hooked on pills ( Nurse Jackie) and a family of thieves and liars ( Shameless). A few of those shows are often fairly good, but they tax the viewer’s soul.

I’ve liked Cheadle in so much else, but he all but cashes out that goodwill with this empty and quickly predictable role. (He’s also a producer of the show, so he has no one to blame but himself.) Unlikability is the hallmark of House of Lies; every page of the script is sticky with someone’s spittle.

Based on a tell-all memoir by real-life consulting guru Martin Kihn, the series pretty much wastes its own premise, which, with a few tweaks, might have been more like HBO’s deeply anti-corporate Enlightened or the 2009 George Clooney movie Up in the Air. Whatever it purports to teach us about the bogus techniques of the high-dollar consulting trade instead gets glossed over and trivialized.

Among its many cable-dramedy cliches, House of Lies is particularly fond of the TV screenwriter’s fantasy that two people who don’t like each other will almost immediately have sex. You know the trope: A man and a woman (or, in one episode, a woman and a woman) glower at one another, trade insults and then, one quick-cut edit later, are in a closet or a car or a bathroom stall, pounding away like butter churners.

In what world? House of Lies is far too transparent, wanting too desperately to be like other shows its creators have clearly studied — a little Entourage here, a little Californication there, and perhaps a dash of Hung. In trying to be about over-the-top characters, it forgets to be about people.