A clichéd comedy about grown-ups and suicide is no laughing matter Mutual Friends BBC1

Finding the new Cold Feet is the Holy Grail of early-21st-century television. Yes, I know: you remember only its incredible smugness, and the fact that it was responsible for inflicting James Nesbitt on us. But it was also a ratings hit, and one that brought in those oh-so-valuable young, middle-class professionals so beloved of advertisers (it went out on ITV). Plus, it was sold to 34 countries. Consequently, every so often, someone else has another go at creating a series in which middle-class people with good hair have lots of bouncy sex and extremely articulate arguments in the comfort of their nice, Victorian houses (preferably with stripped bannisters). The message - for there is always a preachy undertow to this particular genre - usually goes something like this: life is difficult, and will often throw you a curveball. But, hey, so long as you've got real pals - and a dishwasher - you will survive.

Mutual Friends (Tuesdays, 9pm) is chasing Cold Feet territory like nobody's business, and you can almost hear the cast panting as a result. It's possible - just - that it will shape up over the course of a series, but I doubt it. Eew, its tone is misjudged. If you're going to start with a suicide - Carl, a friend of all the male characters and the lover of one of their wives, jumped in front of a train - and then swing straight into comedy, you'd better be sure that your jokes are more than a little funny and black. These were neither. They were just sort of . . . damp, not to mention signposted. When an estranged girlfriend dumps her ex's golf clubs on the floor of his office and then notes, ever-so-coolly that, at this very moment, his sports car is being repossessed - cue frantic dash on his part to stop the bailiffs - something inside you does die a little. But when, in the next scene, said ex is at home, on the phone, while in the background men can be seen taking away his telly, his computer and then . . . Yes, he can't chat any more because they're taking the phone, too - well, then it's probably a good time to go upstairs and have a root round in your knicker drawer to see which items really should be turned into dusters.

But back to the bouncy sex. This is mostly happening in flashback, what with Carl being dead: he was having a fling with Jen (Keeley Hawes), you see, and now her husband, Carl's best friend, Martin (Marc Warren), keeps picturing them doing it. Which is nice. And not that Martin seems especially upset by the revelation. Like all the characters in Mutual Friends, he speaks in the same clipped, slightly sarcastic voice, whether sad or happy. Is this what the director was after, or are the characters simply so dumbstruck by the awfulness of their lines - "The therapist says I'm unfulfilled!" - that it is beyond them to do anything else? And yes, of course the show has a therapist and, naturally, he's called Jolyon, and he wears wooden beads and an earnest, lentil-eating expression at all times.

Then there's Patrick (Alexander Armstrong), who is in catalogues and is Johnny Boden by any other name: "Those plum check cotton drawstring trousers are going to be absolutely massive!" Armstrong is, I note, making thrifty use of the skills he deploys in the Pimm's ads, by which I mean that this is basically the same drill: loud voice; ironic raising of eyebrows; occasional "ooh, ladies!" wink thrown in for good measure. Jeez. The more I think about Mutual Friends, the more I realise it's just dramedy-by-numbers. It has retro titles and an overly jaunty theme tune. It has a bitchy female boss. It even, dear God, has a sad but wise child (Dan, spawn of Martin and Jen) who uses grown-up words like "shagging", and sarky inflections when talking to dumb adults. As for the preachy message, this time it's not subliminal. Shout it out, and shout it out loud. "No one is happy!" yells Jen, throwing Martin's possessions - a welly, anyone? - on to her front drive. Indeed not. We have no right to be so, just as we have no right, apparently, to expect decent, smart, funny new television series more than once every decade.

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