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.

Perfect Couples debuted last night as NBC’s new relationship comedy for the 2010 mid-season, and its 20 minutes of dated setups and flat writing somehow make Cougar Town look like impassioned exposé of relationship malaise in picket fence suburbia.

Three couples, six friends, and nine jokes about sums it up for Perfect Couples, a comedy for those who like their laughs with a comforting dose of “Oh honey, you KNOW it’s true” gender convention. All three couples are Pretty And Young Americans, though their real crime is their complete dearth of interest. Their problems are all interchangeable and, as far as the pilot goes, fluffy and lightweight. One couple argue about sweatpants, and another re-adjusts their sleep cycles to combat jet lag. If you’re waiting for the daylight savings time payoff, don’t bother: most of the good writers are working for another station. Or were fired.

The rot has clearly set in before the program even begins, and they hit the ground running with a “Your butt DOES look big in this” gag, followed by a roundhouse to the face with a “Isn’t it time for a diet?” jibe. Promising beginnings like that can only signal good things, and within minutes the show confirms itself as the Lipstick Jungle of the comedy genre, though on reflection I suspect it straddles that genre line on what I call the ‘Two and a Half Men’ technicality.

The show’s direction is a little old fashioned, though quick edits go some way to keeping it interesting, but it’s fixed-camera setup does give the show an immediate – and welcome – separation from the current NBC lineup, which wasn’t exactly hurting for more mockumentary (‘The Office’, ‘Parks & Recreation’) or free-form (’30 Rock’, ‘Community’) shows. The decision to target a demographic currently served by Desperate Housewives is a wise one which, come sweeps, may just help it survive against opposition several streets ahead in quality.

Its cause is helped by occasional glimmers of comedy, from the brief enjoyment of Hayes MacArthur’s ‘full immersion’ Italian experience, to referential barbs poking fun at the show’s Sex and the City stylings (“Whilst we’d all like to sit here and rhyme things with labia…”). The actors are a mixed bag, with Kyle Bornheimer and Christine Woods doing the most of anyone in developing the singular promising romantic subplot of Dave and Julia. Olivia Munn, meanwhile, a woman whose career was built solely on titillating fanboys and deep-throating mustard wieners, is adequate but wasted on a relationship pairing that barely gets past page 1 of the script.

With banalities and truisms as its modus operandi, it was never likely that Perfect Couples would amount to more than a passing titter, but all too often it fails to elicit even that. The show isn’t completely without promise, and most of the required elements are – on paper, at least – present and accounted for, but through uneven writing that lavishes too much attention on just one of the couples, the pilot never really achieves liftoff, and any comparison to the likes of ABC’S Modern Family are unlikely to be favourable.

Taken strictly as the harmless, middle-of-the-road crowd pleaser it was likely intended as, Perfect Couples isn’t a terrible addition to NBC’s winter staple; merely a terminally forgettable one.