Do you enjoy being manipulated? Of course not. So why would you enjoy watching people as they make plans to manipulate you?


That’s what “The Pitch,” a reality series that has its premiere Sunday night on AMC, is asking you to do. Each episode follows two advertising agencies as they compete for an account, building toward a pitch meeting where the rivals present their ideas to the client.


It’s not hard to see why someone at AMC thought that sandwiching a show about the making of commercials in between real-life commercials would be a good idea. The network is also home to the much gushed about series “Mad Men,” set in the advertising world of yore. (The premiere is showing after an episode of “Mad Men” though the series doesn’t begin in its regular time slot until April 30.)


This attempted piggybacking is its own kind of manipulation. But more to the point, it ignores an obvious truth: A real-life workplace is never as interesting as a fictional one. No drive-along reality cop show is as compelling as a garden-variety “Law & Order” episode. No 24 hours in a real hospital is as eventful as any 24 hours of a medical drama.


“The Pitch” mostly serves as a cautionary tale to young people considering a career in advertising. It screams: “Don’t do it; kid. It’s a drab, unpleasant line of work in which cheesy slogans and gimmicks pass for creativity.”


The premiere pits a California agency called WDCW LA against McKinney, a North Carolina agency. Both are trying to come up with an advertising campaign that will cause 18-to-24-year-olds to run out and buy Subway breakfast sandwiches.


Hearing the competitors talk about their product-hawking efforts in heroic terms is either infuriating or laughable, depending on your frame of mind.


“How are you going to win an account?” says Tracy Wong, a founding partner of WDCW. “You’ve got to slug it out in the gladiator arena with all these other naked, glistening, sword-wielding agencies.”


The ideas that multiple, fully clothed teams at the two agencies produce may leave you wondering why it takes so many people to come up with relatively unexciting stuff. McKinney’s biggest inspiration isn’t even its own; it plucks some home-made rapper off YouTube. Comparing your choices from the pitch meeting with what the clients actually choose is moderately amusing, but over all, “Mad Men” without the sex or the drama or the historical perspective isn’t very good television.


The Pitch


AMC, Sunday night at 11, Eastern and Pacific times; 10, Central time.


Produced by Studio Lambert. Eli Holzman, Stephen Lambert, Philip Lott, Brien Meagher and Aaron Saidman, executive producers; Charles Kreisa, senior producer; John Henshaw, Steven Garcia and Troy Hauschild, producers; Rebekah Fry, supervising producer; Michael Pepin, director of photography; Alex Van Wagner, cinematographer.