Impossibly rich and attractive twenty-somethings spend time in front of the mirror in NBC’s summer comedy, Friends with Benefits.

Impossibly rich and attractive thirty-somethings spend time in front of the mirror in NBC’s soon-to-be-cancelled programme, Friends with Benefits.

One of these is not like the other, which is odd, given that Friends With Benefits is exactly like a lot of other shows – Mad Love and Perfect Couples, for instance; Happy Endings over on ABC is practically identical. Although that one has yet to join the others in the great TV departure lounge, they all share a theme of attractive mannequins hitting up interchangeable city bars, lamenting their perpetual singledom over drinks and one-night stands with [vulnerable/psychotic/stranger/ex], capped by a pledge never to do it again.

They also share two problems: one, they’re not funny. Two, their characters aren’t characters at all.

Billed as comedies, you can imagine why the first might seem a rather insurmountable flaw. Well, here’s a secret: a whole bunch of terminally unfunny shows get by just fine on the basis of otherwise likable characters: CBS’ How I Met Your Mother is one, now coming on for seven years of laugh-track, four camera comedy. What you can’t do, however, is pair those kinds of scripts with leaden placeholders. That kind of thinking leads to shows like Friends With Benefits, in which struggling models are plucked from waitressing gigs in the valley to appear in front of the camera in the hopes they’ll fly.

Unsurprisingly, they do not. Casting the vacuous and the nondescript is rarely a recipe for memorable television, and after four episodes I began to realise not only could I not pick a single one of the cast from a line-up, but that I didn’t even know their names. Whatever failings you might ascribe to How I Met Your Mother, it at least has characters who resemble people you might have encountered, or even know. A certain level of attractiveness is a given – you don’t get very far in TV without it – but they still give off an air of attainability, somehow; we relate to the minutiae. Beneath an inherent glamour lies a group who call a dusty tavern home, in the same way the cast of Friends once did Central Perk. To cite that once lamented symbol of America’s failed democracy, they’re people I’d want to have a beer with. That’s an important quality in choosing a sitcom to commit to.

If it recognises such a truism, then Benefits chooses to ignore it. Consider that one of the leads, Aaron, is a self-made millionaire who lives in a luxurious penthouse. One of his friends is a chiselled jock we faintly remember as the second-worst part of Veronica Mars. His friends come in the more pedestrian guise of nurses and bartenders, and even they’re so distanced from the realities of their profession that they may as well occupy a different trade entirely. Even more telling is the realisation that when these people come together, they do so with no sense of community or bond. For all their supposed in-jokes that hint to shared experiences, there wasn’t a single moment in which I truly believed any of them could be friends.

The pilot submits to its creaking formula by assigning roles early on. Ben and Sara are established as the titular friends in the very first scene. Aaron is the hopeless optimist, and Riley and Julian are… the other two, whose idle commentary is in keeping with superfluous characters everywhere. Ben and Sara casually sleep together, convinced that it doesn’t mean anything when everyone around them knows it does. Sometimes their friends join them in the merry-go-round and sleep with one other, and sometimes they don’t. Later episodes see them exploring party drugs in the naive manner of every programme not on Showtime, followed by mirror-based indulgences and desperate fawning over a series of increasingly dull, handsome dates. Invariably, such adventures will land them right back where started, just a little bit wiser for the experience. And hey, there’s even a narrator to underline their profound spiritual growth.

Friends With Benefits can hardly be called an absolute failure, since its very sterilty precludes any such catastrophic misstep. But in a decade that saw the nurturing of some of the finest shows TV has to offer, is this really the best we can hope for? These writers didn’t fight their way into television just to spend their days rehashing reasons for anonymous, airbrushed characters to have inconsequential sex in soft-focus settings. The pandering isn’t even going to be successful: forgetting all the other networks for a moment, NBC is home to not only the infinitely superior ‘Community’ and ‘Parks and Recreation’, but a whole host of more directly competing shows that in a saner world would have precluded this from even being commissioned.

No matter. Failure is all relative when cancellation just means replacement by an identical show. ABC’s Work It. CBS’ 2 Broke Girls. Fox’s New Girl. NBC’s Witney. Take your pick between a rock and a hard place, loyal viewers, because either way the executive producers are gonna get paid.