Rabbi Shmuley Boteach does home improvement

When one gets sick, he calls a doctor. When one is on death's door, it is customary to call a priest. But when things are really fouled up but good, get thee to a rabbi.

Except in this case, the sickness isn't scabies or chlamydia but poisoned home lives, and the rabbi isn't just the first to hop in the car when one pulls up at a yeshiva and lays on the horn.

Enter Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, domestic savior.

Boteach has carved out a career dispensing his hip yet Orthodox wit and wisdom via a national radio show and the cavalcade of books he puts out with Dershowitzian rapidity. For good or ill, he's one of the most recognizable rabbis in the world, and probably the least camera-shy. And it'd be easy to dismiss him as a publicity-starved, celebrity-obsessed huckster — until he periodically goes and ruins this label by writing or saying something brilliant.

The rabbi's new show on TLC, "Shalom in the Home," is not exactly brilliant. Yet in a medium that usually exploits people's broken home lives or personal problems as grist for a caustic comment by Judge Judy or a televised brawl for Jerry Springer, Boteach and his show stand out.

Yeah, he's slick and talks as if he's hooked up to an espresso IV, but he really seems to care more about helping people than demeaning them. (After all, as he states no fewer than four times in the series' first episode, he's a child of divorce.)

The show revolves around the rabbi motoring about the country and parking his trailer (license plate: SHALOM) in front of a troubled family's house for a week while he sets things right. Episode One features Philadelphia's Romero family. In a nutshell, husband Luis was caught having an affair and thrown out of the house and, in the two years since, the domestic situation between his wife, Beatriz, and their four kids has rapidly descended into a daily re-enactment of the Second Battle of the Marne.

Boteach is not above broadcasting hidden-camera video of the three teenaged daughters and young son hurling hateful epithets at each other and engaging in fisticuffs — once, memorably, with a broom — again and again.

The rabbi's trailer is equipped with a trove of gadgets, and he monitors the family's every last move on a number of TV sets. When he makes Luis and Beatriz sit down and watch their progenies taking brooms to one other, we squirm along with them.

The couple are in their early 30s, yet have a 16-year-old daughter (a detail that could have led to a less-than-stable home, and one that the rabbi does not mention). They cry and nod a lot, which makes it easy for the talkative rabbi to dominate the proceedings. But I'll be damned if I didn't find myself nodding along with Boteach's assessments of the situation despite myself — he is, after all, a child of divorce.

You know what? It makes sense that the three teenaged daughters are behaving like professional wrestlers. It's a self-defense mechanism of inflicting pain to keep from being hurt. And they're learning it from mom.

And it makes sense that the eldest daughter has fallen into the arms of an iffy guy with an anger problem — her dad's not there to tell her he loves her and she's special, so she's getting that from someone else (someone who says things like, "I do love you, why you playing me like that?").

Boteach can be unpleasantly intense, and he goes five-for-five in reducing his counseling subjects to tears (approaching the Barbara Walters pantheon). But he does seem to get through.

Even some of his more contrived gimmicks bear unexpected fruit. When he takes the family of six to a gym for a game of basketball, it smacked of the kind of quick-fix one would expect to see on a TV show. Sure, throw the ball around for an hour and a broken family's problems will be solved.

But the rabbi flashed a little depth. First, he had the kids choose to play on mom's team or dad's team to observe family alliances in motion. But then he broke up the teams, pitting mom and dad vs. the kids — forcing Luis and Beatriz to work together and allowing the kids to watch their estranged parents cooperate.

When Boteach hops in his trailer and drives off, the Romero's situation is far from resolved. But, just as I was writing in my notes "Where's the update?" there it was. After a two-month hiatus, the rabbi dropped back in on the Philly family to see how things were going. And, no matter what you think of Boteach, it appears he did this family well.

If your TV only fires up when "Newshour with Jim Lehrer" comes on or you crack out the DVD collection of "The Jewel in the Crown," well, then this isn't the show for you. But if you've ever participated in a debate about when MTV's "The Real World" started to go downhill, then "Shalom in the Home" airs at 10 p.m. on Monday, April 10 on TLC.