• Vizcaya, 7-8 p.m. Sunday, WPBT-PBS 2.

Bored to Death, 9:30-10 p.m. HBO.

If the surgeon-general is watching TV Sunday night, expect the government to issue a new warning label later in the week: Confusing fantasy with reality can be hazardous to your marriage or to your documentary. It's a lesson taught amusingly in HBO's new sitcom Bored to Death and painfully in the PBS documentary Vizcaya.

Writing about a warning within, rather than against, an HBO comedy is something of a novel concept. After the Sex and the City franchise moved from TV to film five years ago, the network unleashed a long string of sitcom bombs that detonated so explosively they actually destroyed any memory you'd ever seen them. (Really: Can you remember a single scene from Lucky Louie? Or The Life and Times of Tim?)

But over the past few months, first with the improbable manwhore tale Hung and now with the mock-noir Bored to Death, HBO seems to have rediscovered its comic touch.

Created by self-mythologizing writer Jonathan Ames, who routinely inserts himself into his own work as a semi-fictional character, Bored to Death stars Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore) as a notional Ames who experiences life only secondhand, through a haze of wine, dope and pulp literature. When both his writing career and his marriage break down, Ames whimsically places an ad on the Internet offering his services as a private detective -- and is confounded when clients start calling.

If the fictional Ames has been reading too much Raymond Chandler, the real one has probably been watching too many Woody Allen movies. With a lead character who's an ineffectual intellectual daydreaming about life as a hard-bitten detective, wallowing in Semitic guilt (asked if he's ``another self-hating New York Jew,'' Ames proudly replies, ``Yes, I am!'') and romantic befuddlement (he nods knowingly when a female client observes that ``guys who are a - - holes are always the best at sex''), Bored to Death often resembles Play It Again, Sam, Lite.

But if the imitation is pale, it's also competent. And Schwartzman's wistful but inept romanticism is hard to resist. ``I should have thought of that,'' he mutters when listening to a spurned lover explain that he kidnapped an ex-girlfriend in hopes that Stockholm Syndrome would revive their relationship.

`VIZCAYA'

Stockholm Syndrome might also be a plausible explanation for the ponderous and annoyingly reverent PBS documentary Vizcaya, which veers perilously close to Jaycee boosterism in its relentless promotion of industrialist James Deering's ill-fated mansion as the eighth wonder of the world.

Vizcaya is interesting, without a doubt, as a monument to the peculiar taste of one nouveau riche American businessman and his foppish, seahorse-obsessed decorator. Its promiscuous pastiche of styles ranges from Greek neo-classicism to Italian Renaissance to Cuban colonial. Whether it's art -- much less great art, as the documentary repeatedly insists -- is another matter. If Vizcaya had been built last year by a Saudi oil sheik bloated with petro dollars, I suspect we'd brand it a gauche temple to vulgarian dereliction.

Even sillier is the documentary's attempt to imbue Vizcaya with major historical significance. What little history is associated with it is all in the design and construction; as an actual residence it lasted less than a decade. After Deering's death, his heirs found it an unliveable white elephant that nobody wanted, and eventually did what lots of rich people do with their colossal blunders: stuck the taxpayers with the tab, then practically broke their arms giving themselves congratulatory pats on the back for their splendid philanthropic generosity.

If Vizcaya hadn't been so busy canonizing its subject, it might have told a truly interesting story about a South Florida archetype. Deering is notable mainly as a guy who moved to Miami because it was an empty patch of jungle, then immediately built a walled estate to keep the rest of the world at a safe distance. In other words, he was the the first of the I-got-mine-now-screw-you NIMBYs who, from within their hermetically sealed Palm Beach compounds, rail at the rest of us to go back where we came from.

Now that's a documentary I'd like to see.

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