Cable Girl: Raising Hope

Raising Hope (Sky 1 and 2) has many echoes of its predecessor, My Name is Earl. Both were created by Greg Garcia and both centre on characters drawn from that perennially unpopular (in sitcom-land) pool, the American underclass. In Raising Hope, the sub-Everyman anti-hero is Jimmy Chance. He cleans neighbourhood pools for a living with his dad and cousin-some-times-removed ("I think we're related by divorce or something"), lives with the rest of his family and his senile great-grandma and has vague dreams of a better life.

After he rescues a fleeing damsel called Lucy in apparent distress, they have celebratory sex in the back of his van. The next morning she is revealed to be a serial killer of her boyfriends. She is jailed and 15 months later executed, leaving Jimmy with the baby it turns out she conceived that jubilatory night.

It has been a hit in the US, but it is hard to see – on the strength of the pilot at least – quite how. Lucas Neff as Jimmy shows how thin the line is between Earl-ish easygoing charm and utter lack of charisma. The jokes are frequently laboured – Jimmy's mother urges him to "safe-drop the baby at the fire station" at least three times – derivative (we get the new father thinking it will take five minutes to settle the baby at night; vomiting during his first nappy change; the new girlfriend being told about the vagaries of the toilet system by the mother, who is oblivious to the humiliating effects on her son), and its vaunted portrayal of the missing-in-television-action no-collar working class is even more frequently crass, equating too often to simply stupid or primitive. Would Jimmy really not know that you had to strap a car seat to the back seat or think that you had to buy jars of babyfood that had pictures of children who looked like Hope on the front?

But we have only seen the pilot. Raising Hope is still a newborn itself. Let's hope it grows into something a bit bouncier and bonnier over the next few weeks. My Name is Optimist.