There is nothing black and white about Black. White., a curious new documentary series premiering tomorrow night at 8 p.m. on SUN TV.

The premise of the series is starkly simple: What would it be like to live for a while in someone else's skin?

The bigger picture is much more complicated. This is a series that goes to the heart of the race issue in the United States and, by extension, Canada.

The producers of the series, R.J. Cutler (The War Room, American High) and actor/rapper Ice Cube, (Barbershop), took two middle class families, one white and one black, and with the help of an Oscar-winning makeup team, swapped their ethnicities. The families are also coached as to how to talk (with the black family told to "pronounce... every... word"). Then they're thrown together in a shared house for six tense weeks while they're filmed squirming in each other's 'hoods.

In other words, families swap race like they swap wives on other reality shows. There is a gimmicky feel to this series which works against it at times. It feels like just another TV prank, like we're being punk'd by the Wayans.

Does it work anyway? At best, Black. White. feels like White Chicks by way of Frontline. Brian Sparks, 41, the black dad from Atlanta, looks like Simpsons cartoon neighbour Ned Flanders in his bushy brown wig and natty moustache. White Santa Monica mom Carmen Wurgel, 48, looks like she's wearing one of those old Jeri Curl wigs you used to see in the back of comic books.

Then again, 18-year-old Rose Bloomfield makes an astonishing and believable physical transformation into a black teenager.

What is far more interesting, once you get past the goofy visual jolt, is how successful or unsuccessful each of the participants is at genuinely assimilating into each other's cultures. Bloomfield takes the most daring leap, hanging with a slam poetry group, where she is eventually put on the spot to perform.

Her parents? Forget it. Mom Carmen thinks its Halloween in Harlem. She merrily picks out a traditional African dashikis to wear to a black church service. As black dad Sparks says, "Why don't they just dress like Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottle and get it over with?"

Even when some truth emerges at these sessions -- as when Bloomfield gets blasted by one poet, angered at her deception -- you're never sure if the reactions are real. The intrusion of cameras all along reduce the participants to a Big Brother level. If you know the camera is in the room, aren't you performing as well as reacting?

The reviews in the States (where the series broke last month) have been mixed. "There are few worse things in the TV universe than nonsense masquerading as substance," wrote USA Today's Robert Bianco. "It's a shame so much of Black. White. is annoying, because it offers occasional small moments of enlightenment," wrote the Washington Post. Others called its insights only skin-deep.

By the end of the six-episode series, there is no clear resolution or enlightenment beyond the notion that, as far as we've come, we still have a long way to go.

Still, for the local Springer station, this is a step in the right direction. The show will shake you up even if the central trick turns you off. SUN TV should search for more risky U.S. cable fare like Black. White.