Men at Work

Series one, episode one
From the moment the first can of laughter was opened, American sitcoms have traded in cliché. ‘Men at Work’ is just the latest venture into the ‘mismatched friends looking for love’ sub-genre: sensitive geek, brash gagster and lovable womaniser get together to help Milo, their relatively normal chum, find a girl after a brutal dumping.

If there was much breeze around, these guys would doubtless shoot it; but ‘Men at Work’ is becalmed between the cosy conventions of sitcom (note the baffling foray into soft-rock balladry as Milo muses over his broken relationship) and the racy, male ‘Sex and the City’ it probably aspires to be. The jokes are telegraphed and the set-ups timeworn, but at least there’s sufficient chemistry among the leads to makes their friendship explicable.

Not offensively bad, but entirely indistinct from sitcoms past, present and, most probably, future.