Comedy news: There's something wrong with the New Girl

Anyone who has seen a London bus in the last two months will already be well-acquainted with Zooey Deschanel's new comedy New Girl, starting tomorrow on Channel 4. If you've seen the above poster, you've basically already seen half the show. Zooey is kooky (she bites her lip at that kooky thing she's just done); Zooey is pretty (in a part-Katy Perry, part-Anna Friel way); Zooey is pretty and kooky (she has one of those fringes that girls tell each other look pretty if they also bite their lip to make themselves look like that blank-faced blow-up doll who starred in 500 Days of Summer).

Zooey is Jess, which you will know because she sings her theme song to herself a lot, like a charmless late-season Scrubs character. She's a post-breakup mess of Dirty Dancing viewings, social backwardness and various other 'adorable' tics that only a man raised on Lynx commercials would think is how a real woman thinks and acts. (Strangely the series was created by an 'Elizabeth Meriwether', but that HAS to be a man with a girl's name, like Viv Richards. It's the only explanation.)

The other half of the show are her new flatmates. There's Douchepipe Alpha, the one who is actually supposed to be a douchepipe, because if he was a real person, you would be utterly unsurprised to discover he was on the Violent and Sex Offenders' Register. There's Douchepipe Spineless, the one who would be a fullblown douchepipe if he got over his low self-esteem following an ancient breakup. And there's Douchepipe Wayans, a Wayans Brothers offspring who's basically a more laidback version of Douchepipe Alpha. (On the upside, he's gone by episode two, so there'll be a whole new sort of douchepipe to look forward to. Exciting!)

You may have noticed the highly American name-labelling of douchepiping there, but for however many variants of wankers we may have in Britain, there is something particularly American (or rather, American TV) in the characterless horndoggery on show here. 

It's hard to think of a comedy with such utterly unlikeable characters as New Girl, and the writing isn't enough to keep you coming back. The closest to a good joke in the first episode is a thin rip-off of 30 Rock's jokes that Tina Fey looks terrible when she very clearly doesn't. New Girl just doesn't have the charm to pull it off.

Still, Channel 4 seem to be expecting big things from the show. On top of the most inappropriately-sized ad campaign since the Morgana Show, Deschanel has turned up in general Channel 4 advertising, as if we're supposed to embrace the show to our bosom. 

We're all for light and breezy sitcoms and America knocks Britain into a cocked hat at that particular game, but this is much too thin to qualify. Fingers crossed, this will be abandoned to die in a quiet corner of the E4 schedule before the first season is out.