Porn Valley- You’d think that if someone went to all the trouble to cook up something as cynical and yet so deviously inspired as “My Bare Lady,” they wouldn’t muck it up so much with the sort of boringly familiar reality-show tropes that appear in virtually every other competition show.

“My Bare Lady” (a brassiere is tastefully slung over its logo) features porn stars competing for the opportunity to go to London and humiliate themselves in the world of legitimate theater, a wickedly sinister conceit that allows viewers to both ogle and laugh at essentially clueless young women.

(But isn’t that what porn itself is for?)

And yet, tonight’s episode hedges its bets, with a lot of uninteresting folderol that every reality show in existence foists upon its viewers: the farewell montage to the cattle-call losers, whom we don’t know or care about in the first place; the perfectly unrevealing portraits of the winners, who seem practically interchangeable; their giddy squeals as they meet at the airport, and further giddy squeals as they move into their posh temporary digs, and their further giddy squeals

You get the idea. Tonight’s installment offers about two minutes of laughs as the aspiring thespians mangle lines from “Romeo and Juliet.” One contestant confesses to never having heard of it (good work, American educational system!); another professes the belief it was written by a woman.

Another dismisses the notion that she would be familiar with the text with a discursive, “Reading books is very time-consuming,” while another young woman is disconcerted to discover that “hey’re looking for someone who (understands) it, apparently.”

In general, the women seem petulantly miffed that any actual effort is required of this whole “acting” thing. Only one, Sasha Knox, appears to have a brain in her head and an actual appreciation of culture (as well as, naturally, sex).

Even a network as brazen as Fox Reality can’t fully exploit the show’s porn element, though they try wanly with montages of the women re-creating Meg Ryan’s big deli scene in “When Harry Met Sally” and listing the titles of the films they’ve appeared in.

Future episodes, as the women begin rehearsing for their Shakespearean debuts (“As You Like It,” indeed), may perk up as they realize how in over their heads they are, but tonight’s episode isn’t as clever or as saucy as it needs to be to hook viewers.