The Duggars admire the 16th addition.

AP / SPECER TIREY

Whatever its other intentions 17 Kids and Counting has the potential to keep the culture wars raging along. This series, being shown Mondays at 10 p.m. on TLC, follows a round of specials documenting the daily logistics of the Duggars of Tontitown, Ark., the evangelical Christian family of a couple named Jim Bob and Michelle, who during the course of their 24-year marriage have produced 10 sons and seven daughters, spread out in a 7,000-square-foot house with nine bathrooms.

The Duggars have been the subject of fierce debate online, where liberal women often condemn their choices as reckless and conservative women defend their patience and commitment as inspirational.

A call to parenthood that would cause 99.9 percent of American couples to sneak out in the middle of the night and leave their children with a lifetime supply of juice boxes does not even appear to overwhelm the Duggars, and that has the effect of making them seem denial-prone or indifferent even as they are shown to be paying considerable attention to the small nation-state they oversee.

The Duggars home-school their children and create whole domains of responsibility rather than simply doling out chores. The laundry room, as Michelle puts it, “currently that’s Jinger’s jurisdiction.” (All the Duggar children have names that begin with the letter J: Josiah, Jedidiah, Joy-Anna, Johannah.)

Michelle never seems to raise her voice or even grow tense. Jim Bob manages to keep his hair perfectly combed. This is all quite mesmerizing, as if a 300-pound person suddenly landed in an ice rink during a figure skating event and performed a quadruple axel without incident. The Duggars aren’t even so exhausted as to say, “Seventeen is enough.” Another child is due in January, and the couple broke the news to the rest of the family during an appearance on Today in May. When the obstetrician calls, who among us doesn’t want to tell Meredith Vieira first?

The premiere episode of 17 Kids and Counting tracked the Duggars’ Today trip to New York. While the family toured the city, the producers of the TLC series prompted the children to deliver their streaming impressions, and the results are very “Green Acres.” They cannot get over all the hustle and mayhem. “In Central Park there’s actually children there,” one of the boys says. “The rest of the city I didn’t see too many children, but Central Park there was a lot of kids.”

Jim Bob brought his prejudices with him, believing you can only hail a taxi if you’re waving money in your hand. Another boy is entranced by the large screens in Times Square even though some of the ads are “raunchy.” The Duggar children are not allowed to watch cable television, only obliged to appear on it.

The family has received so much news-media attention during the past year — the Duggars are frequently recognized during their stay in Manhattan when they are not presumed to be Amish — that 17 Kids and Counting presupposes a certain amount of knowledge on the viewer’s part. It does not address the most glaring question any newcomer will have: Why are there 17 Duggar children? While on the pill 20 years ago, Michelle had a miscarriage that left her bereft and turned her against birth control. “They were grieved! They were Christians! They were pro-life!” the family Web site, duggarfamily.com, explains. “They asked God to bless them with as many children as He saw fit.”

17 Kids and Counting maintains a compassionate tone toward the Duggars. But its existence seems designed to make anyone watching it feel righteous. The mother of the well-spoken only child gets to feel smug. The religious mother of six gets to feel as though Christian families are sacred. This show doesn’t exploit the people in it; it exploits the divisions among everyone watching.