What else is there for Deion Sanders to do?

What Else Is There for Deion Sanders to Do? Reality TV, of course. The former football and baseball player Deion Sanders is blessed with a charm that leaks through the armour of his arrogance, observes Ginia Bellafante. Back in the early 1990s, when he was proving himself one of the greatest athletes in living memory, playing cornerback for the Atlanta Falcons and outfield for the Braves, Mr. Sanders responded to the critical comments of the baseball announcer Tim McCarver by dousing him with ice water. Still, the athlete’s status as a dazzler, a fun lover, a guy with whom you’d love to share a Coors Light or six, suffered no lasting fracture.

When the cameras show up, Mr. Sanders knows how to beguile. Seeing him on his new reality series, Deion & Pilar: Prime Time Love, (which begins Tuesday on the Oxygen channel), travelling through his mansion on a motorized scooter, like an 82-year-old navigating O’Hare, seems only to confirm his particularly entitled brand of genius.

Prime Time Love is the latest in a long list of reality shows that tries to tap into the wifely grievances of women across the class spectrum who can’t stop shaking their heads in disbelief at their husbands’ domestic inadequacies. It is a short distance from an Erma Bombeck column to something like Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood, which showcases the rapper’s suburban lollygagging and spousal disobedience.

Living on a hundred plus acres in the suitably named Prosper, Tex., Mr. Sanders and his wife, Pilar, a former model-actress, argue about chores and child rearing. In him you are meant to see your own lovable lug, but the conceit is a total canard. While your husband may not be able to tell the difference between a box of Cascade and a box of cake flour, he also hasn’t put you up in a 40,000-square-foot house with a video arcade and a marital bed that looks like a large pie.

What makes Prime Time Love such a hoot isn’t merely the image of a grown man too lazy to walk to the kitchen, but also the even more preposterous idea that someone married to the one person ever to play in both the Super Bowl and the World Series would expect an equitable division of household labour.

Mr. Sanders has five children — Deion Jr., Deiondra, Shilo, Shedeur and Shelomi — and the series puts his parental ineptitude on full display. When the younger ones require a primer on reproduction, for instance, Mr. Sanders plops them in front of the TV to watch geezer sex educator Sue Johanson (who has her own show on Oxygen) on the grounds that if he were teaching them about basketball he’d call Michael Jordan, and if he’s going to talk about sex he is going to go to the best. This turns out to be not half as funny as watching Mr. Sanders read to his children from “Getting Smart About Your Private Parts” or hearing him explain that Jack and Jill did not go up a hill to fetch a pail of water. You almost forget that he is leveraging his sons’ future sexual sanity in order to forge his persona as a hero whose intuitive gifts should excuse his buffoonery.

To be on board with Prime Time Love, you’ve got to excuse a lot, as the show rests on the highly implausible premise that the Sanderses don’t employ help. If true, this would be more impressive than Mr. Sanders’s N.F.L. record for touchdown returns. Some years ago, when he was sued by a car repair shop for failing to pay a bill in full, housekeepers who blocked his car from being towed were cited in the news coverage. Presumably these loyal housekeepers haven’t been expunged.

Absent in the Sanders house, though, is a certain kind of common sense. No one has ever seemed to let Mrs. Sanders know that the price of marriage to a rich and successful man is a recalibration of the hope that the person you’re living with will ever make his own sandwich. Every time she is on her husband about something, you think Mr. Sanders is going to respond by lining up his pay stubs. That he can turn his princely indifference to the mundane into something like an endearing eccentricity proves that he is in possession of certain talents no sports statistician could quantify.

Prime Time Love is on Oxygen, Tuesday night at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time.