If leaving a big show is a road paved with good intentions, then Matt LeBlanc’s career is surely the Highway of Death out of Kuwait. The spectre of Friends looms large even now, some 7 years after it came to an end, and his pitch for a Kelsey Grammer career in spinoff ‘Joey’ failed to find a by-then weary audience. To add insult to injury, his movie career was over before it began, watching helplessly as 1998′s Lost in Space received a critical panning so universal that he might well have wished he’d… well, the jokes write themselves.

Billed as something of a critical revival for LeBlanc, Showtime’s ‘Episodes’ premiered last week and, as his first acting venture in a number of years, is a valiant attempt to distance himself from the Tribbiani brand he’s become so completely synonymous with. The premise is certainly a promising one, structured around a British writing duos attempts to recreate their show in America. Though its setup allows him a degree of humility in sending himself up for the sake of a good script, what will have more immediately struck LeBlanc is the conspicuous absence of a laughter track to lean on; a concession to the prevailing wind of almost all high-end comedy since HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. A brave step away from the world of Friends it might be, but having seen the end product one wonders whether there actually *was* a studio audience present, just not one that found any of it very funny; for a comedy, it’s scarily plausible.

The writers – both in real life and on the show – are Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan, who you might remember from Channel 4′s clever Green Wing. Together, they’ve gone about as far as you can in British comedy without climbing the ego scaffolding of Ricky Gervais, and so this trip across the pond seems the natural next step. Mangan is cast as the buffoonish Sean Lincoln, a genial enough type who finds himself lurching from one inconsequential faux pas to another without a trace of mean-spirited intentionality. In contrast, on-screen wife Beverley (Greig) is immediately revealed as the unlikeliest comedy writer this side of Rob Schneider, by virtue of being profoundly and relentlessly unfunny. As seems to be typical for TV, she comes across as a nagging harridan wherever possible, and if it’s an act designed to elicit sympathy for the terminally brow-beaten Sean, then it does so at the cost of turning a central pillar of the show into an unintentional hate-figure.

Perhaps understandably, much of the show’s press coverage has focused on LeBlanc, but he remains a resolutely low-key figure during the opening episodes, trading in his former goofball routine for a much straighter performance, albeit one complete with “Hey hey, look at me” nudges to the audience. The focus is instead on the Lincoln’s dealings with the network, primarily their growing realisation that the wooing received back home doesn’t necessarily translate to even cooperation stateside. Kathleen Rose Perkin is amusing enough as the couple’s smiley-happy agent, but what little fun there is in John Pankow’s condescending stint as network president is overshadowed by an Alec Baldwin who, in so completely corning the market in smiling-obliviousness, reveals characters such as his to be little more than uninspired pastiche.

More successful are the facial tics of Morning Randolph (Mircea Monroe), who doesn’t so much indicate displeasure as physically groan with her entire face, feigning an American drawl that wonderfully straddles the line between being demeaning and simply dumbfounded. Richard Grittiths is an equal delight as Julian Bullard in the guise of an aging British actor, whose appearance as an auditionee that will delight those who, like me, assumed he was dead; the back-and-forth as he tries to win over a bemused and reticent panel is a colourful delight in an otherwise dull palette.

The tone of the show is very much one of a warmed over Curb Your Enthusiasm, and while it superficially shares many of the trappings that propelled Larry David’s comedy to critical acclaim, in practice it’s more akin to something a modern-day Jerry Seinfeld would get involved with. The pacing is best likened to an amputee fishing for rusks in a bucket of lard, and the script is almost entirely without humour, situational or otherwise: brief moments of cute observation are overshadowed by running ‘jokes’ that seemingly peak with Sean and Beverley’s home security guard, who we’re hilariously reminded on at least three occasions can’t remember the new arrivals and must blindly ask who they’re here to see. It barely registers as an amusing diversion the first time, but by the third iteration you come to realise that it’s not so much a setup as an actual punchline.

Episodes mostly refrains from leaning on lazy cultural stereotypes (“Americans just don’t get irony” [smug Briton]), and the writers are wise to resist the temptation to have LeBlanc play another vacuous Joey-clone: he’s pitched instead as a regular guy who has just enough self-awareness to know he’s wrong for the part he’s been put forward for, and isn’t above sharing a few ‘I know, I know’ shrugs with the equally swept-up-by-momentum Lincolns. Yet much as I can see why creator David Crane found the premise an appealing departure from his 90s work, glimmers of life are far too thinly spread to save a show so thoroughly beaten to the punch by 8 years or more. With Curb Your Enthusiasm coming off what many consider to be its strongest year, and other network comedies breaking new ground elsewhere, the only conclusion to draw from Episodes is of a show that has scant reason to exist at all, no matter how much LeBlanc might need it to.