You have to get past the sneaky feeling that the rom-com “La Dolce Villa” wasn’t just conceived and rigidly scripted according to “Hallmark” formula, but by some new AI that the greeting card company rents out to production companies.

Find a hunky, just-past-50 TV star as your lead, a “Pretty Little Liars” alumna willing to go “perky” and play the sweet, naive daughter and a lovely age-appropriate-but-unknown-in-North America Italian leading lady.

Park them in a scenario that involves such middle-age passions as home renovation and food, and set the whole enterprise in the most scenic, quaint and ancient Italian town (San Gregorio da Sassola) you can find, and you’ve got yourself a winner.

That “get past” is a big ask in a wish-fulfillment fantasy that’s about as surprising as a calzone, as original as pizza and as romantic and chaste as a 1960s romance novel. It’s Hallmarkish to the point of mawkish. All that’s missing is a Christmas tree or three.

But it plays. Scott Foley, a TV regular from “Dawson’s Creek” to “Felicity” to “Scandal” anchors it all in a sort of bland, dreamy unreality and there’s just enough scenery, “local color” and cooking to let this “It’ll all work out, we just know it” pass the time.

Foley plays Eric, a consultant who travels to Italy to check in on his drifting, hasn’t-found-her-purpose daughter. Olivia (Maia Reficco) is out of college, nannying, olive-picking and Renaissance Fairing her way through Europe. Part of a genration with “no job security, no health insurance” and stuck in a country that keeps voting itself further away from fixing that, she’s decided to buy a house in a shrunken, aged Italian village and make her life there.

It’s not as “trust fund baby” as all that, although we hear there is indeed a “trust fund” that her dead mom (another Hallmark cliche) left her. She’s buying an abandoned house for one euro in scenic but dying-out Montezera.

Dad’s efforts to intervene in this “insanity” meet Olivia’s determination to go through with it, and Mayor Francesca’s (Violante Placido) too-helpful “Let’s make this happen” attentions. The house shopping commences, as abandoned villas are totally a thing in dying-out rural Italy.

Sure, “We’ve got a renovation genius” (Simone Luglio) in town. Just one, though. Sure, the Italian “permit” bureaucracy is daunting. But Bernardo (Giusseppe Futia) is all over that. He’d like to be all over the mayor, whom he’s sweet on.

Sure, enough people there speak American English so that Olivia’s obsession with “vibing” is understood with many an Italian reassuring her “I got you.”

Wouldn’t you know it, “consultant” Eric used to be a chef and “consults” on restaurant operations. He’s swept up — a little — by the food. And this house? Maybe the “kitchen” has possibilities beyond a way-too-much-room-for-a-single-24-year-old’s “villa.”

Romantic complications abound in a story that doesn’t come close to committing to its first, best destiny — teaching a wound-up 50something workaholic the Italian “sweetness of doing nothing.” The sumptuous food is hinted at here and there, but that also lacks “commitment” by the screenplay.

“Are you seeing dollar signs again?” is as sharp as the criticism of the ever-so-American dad gets.

The home renovation stuff is sanitized for our protection. Makeup isn’t mussed, nary a hair it out of place, and our 20something tidies up a garden and helps with a little wall demolition without dirtying her belly shirt.

The cute little old gossips in the town square might have provided some seasoning, and Eric’s insistence that trips to Italy are “cursed” for his family is brought up and abandoned.

A script lacking surprises or true “tests” of its no-edge-at-all characters lacks drama, another hallmark of Hallmark-style romantic melodramas.

“Passes the time” is about as challenging as “La Dolce Villa” — the title’s a play on the Fellini classic “La Dolce Vita” (“The Sweet Life”) — gets. But it’s pretty enough and just engaging enough to suggest it might just become a series pilot.

And if that happens, you can bet they’ll get around to the Christmas trees.

Rating: TV-14, suggestions of intimacy

Cast: Scott Foley, Maia Reficco, Violante Placido, Simone Luglio, Giselle Gant and Giuseppe Futia

Credits: Directed by Mark Waters, scripted by Elizabeth Hackett and Hillary Galanoy. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39