TELEVISION Dressing for Breakfast (C4)

While Channel 4 is a frenetic importer of reliable American comedy, efforts to design home-grown models have been mixed. Drop the Dead Donkey was an unalloyed triumph, but Paris and Father Ted, two cheerful celebrations of stereotype, missed more frequently than they hit. It's never fair to judge a sitcom on its first outing, because introductions are always awkward when one of those shaking hands is so eager to impress. The best you can usually say of any new sitcom is "nice to meet you".

You can say it of Dressing for Breakfast, that rare sitcom on a mission to redraw the boundaries that mark out what you can laugh at. This agenda sounds grander than it is, as it's actually no more than a girlie version of Men Behaving Badly, another comedy that's frank about sexual motive. But where women are concerned these are uncharted waters - or they are in television comedy. The crochet-your-own-orgasm ethic has kept Cosmopolitan in business for years, whereas female smut is as new to sitcom as its male equivalent is old.

The freshness of Dressing for Breakfast combines nicely with a vague whiff of threat. You'd never find Martin Clunes seeing the funny side of vaginal cystitis, or even knowing that there's an unfunny side. In episode one there was a witty and unprecedentedly detailed sequence of gags about oral sex, which ordinary male viewers might find too belittling to laugh at in comfort. It takes a woman scriptwriter, and preferably one, like Stephanie Calman, without previous sitcom experience, to get a shower of cunnilingus jokes past the blue pencil.

The credit sequence depicts our two girls slavering over gorgeous males who turn out, for whatever reason, to be unavailable. Like the dumb-show in Hamlet, the gist of the show is niftily established before a word has been spoken: girls gagging for it. These aren't a novelty on television: in fiction there's Pauline Calf, played by a man; in reality there's Margi Clarke, who merely looks like one. Beatie Edney's Louise is more believable than either. That's not to say that she actually is believable: though she's often found in rather stern or stifling roles, a casting agent could easily have come up with someone less patently attractive.

The strength of the series is likely to rest on Louise's relationship, not with her best pal Carla, sassily played by Holly Aird, but with her mother Liz. Calman has taken the AbFab template of the nagging, faddish mother and buffed her up into a sexual success story. Charlotte Cornwell as Liz hogs the best lines, and they're all aimed at her daughter: "You're feeling very unheard at the moment." Or, "Have you thought of doing one of Holly's anger workshops?"

There's also some pretty low stuff. Last night Louise was paired with a finely drawn gargoyle from America, and Liz, off on honeymoon, gives him her daughter's number "should anything arise". But the joke is only inserted so the script can then sneer at it. In Rude Foodspeak, this is known as smearing your cake all over succulent flesh and lingeringly licking it up.