Steamy and Stimulating

In addition, the couples are white and affluent and live in coldly modern houses. They seem to be occupying the same sterile territory as the characters in Francois Truffaut's futuristic fantasy "Fahrenheit 451." The icy austerity borders on forbidding.

In virtually every other way, however, "Tell Me You Love Me" has the makings of an HBO blockbuster. Far more important, it promises to be an enlightening and enlightened look at human sexuality -- very human and very, very sexual.

'Curb Your Enthusiasm'

Larry David is up to his old tricks, but there is no great clamor in the land for him to learn new ones. The sixth-season premiere of his punishingly funny comedy "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- tomorrow night on HBO -- hums and strums along as if David and company had never taken a hiatus and the show had never gone away. If life were perfect, it never would.

But then, if life were perfect, David wouldn't have much to be funny about. As usual, David as David is always at odds and sometimes at war with the world, and if he momentarily runs out of windmills to tilt at, a windmill will appear out of nowhere and come tilting at him.

"I've been apologizing to people since I was 6 years old, on a daily basis," David says in the third of three new episodes sampled. No one familiar with the character could wonder why.

David says that just before stealing flowers from a roadside memorial to Ida Funkhouser, mother of Larry's friend Marty and victim of a reckless driver who ran over her wheelchair. Actually, she might have been the reckless one; we are mercifully spared the accident itself.

Get the picture? No? Then you might not be accustomed to David territory. Some of David's betes noires go back to his days as co-creator of "Seinfeld," such as his paranoid obsession with dry cleaners and the worldwide dry-cleaner conspiracy. (In West L.A., where David lives, there is literally no limit to the amount of time people will spend at the dry cleaners, fussing over a stain or a smudge.)

In the second episode -- particularly insane and hilarious -- David rails against what he sees as "complete chaos in the dry-cleaning industry" involving purposely misplaced garments. Other matters that factor in the first three shows: a homeless family that David, on insistence from wife Cheryl (the formidable Cheryl Hines), has imported from a hurricane-devastated city; a seemingly foolproof device for avoiding dull parties (so foolproof that it fails miserably, twice); the hidden virtue of making "anonymous" charitable donations -- so long as you tell everybody who "anonymous" really is; and a novel new definition of adultery concocted by Susie Greene against her hapless husband, Jeff.

Susie is played, as usual, with awesome ferocity by Susie Essman and Jeff by Jeff Garlin. Guest stars in that second episode include California Sen. Barbara Boxer; Vivica A. Fox as a chain-smoking member of the hurricane family; and the fundamentally gorgeous Gina Gershon as Anna, a dry cleaner who gets the giggles -- and who can blame her? The giggles are the least of it. Google "giggles" and Larry David's puss might pop up. Same, perhaps, with "guffaws."

"Curb Your Enthusiasm" is this kind of perversely riotous comedy: As much as you may love it, you can completely understand somebody else hating it. It's fortunate that the show is "one of a kind" because more than one would be too many. Then again, probably nobody but Larry David could concoct it.

It's "pritty good," as Larry likes to say. Pritty, pritty, pritty good. In fact, pritty great.

Tell Me You Love Me (one hour) premieres tomorrow night at 9 on HBO, followed by Curb Your Enthusiasm (30 minutes).