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There’s one problem buying into the idea that David Duchovny is a waster of epic proportions: he looks far too buff. In Californication (Five), the former X Files star is a writer down on his luck, a terrible parent, mordant, washed up and bitter. His hair is a mess, he slurs every word – yet somehow through the fog of life’s many indignities he has maintained a perfect six-pack.

The show clearly wanted a controversial start, so featured his character, Hank Moody, receiving oral sex from a nun in church. This turned out to be a dream. But, just before Hank could receive oral sex from his current lady-friend, her boyfriend came back. Hank sprinted for his life and escaped without his trousers. He picked up his daughter from his long-suffering ex-wife in his underwear and, when they got back to his place his daughter found yet another conquest, naked, in his bedroom.

Californication is made by Show-time, the US cable network that likes to push it sexually (it produced The L Word and Queer As Folk). But this louche comedy-drama, for all its, erm, cockiness, is at heart quite traditional. Hank may treat women appallingly and be self-destructive but he’s essentially a good guy, right?

He confronts a thoughtless man in the cinema who is annoying everyone by talking on his mobile phone and earns all-round applause. But then he goes to a bookshop just to look at copies of his own book (which was turned into a screenplay starring “Tom and Katie”). In a nice take on how Hollywood warps a writer’s work, the book, which started life as God Hates Us All, became a rom-com called A Crazy Little Thing Called Love. Hank has the typical artistic ego: balloon-sized but liable, at any moment, to burst.

Unwittingly, while perusing his own fine prose, he picks up his ex-wife’s new beau’s daughter who, he later discovers, is only 16. But we were encouraged not to judge that too harshly. A teacher tells him that Becca, his 12-year-old daughter, is worrying her teachers with her “emerging sexuality” which he takes to mean emerging lesbian sexuality. This makes him very happy: “Men are assholes.” But the teacher means Becca is an early blooming hetero-sexual and, after one riotous party, Hank marches into the venue and carries his daughter to the car.

So good dad, bad man. His bad side was again highlighted after he demolished a date foolish enough to define what she is really like by heaping scorn upon her. He thinks his problem is that he’s not still married, and from the occasional doe-eyed look of his ex it looks like we’re in for one long reunion. Will Hank ever really be the all-out nasty man-whore he intimates that he is; or will the writers go soft on him? This show wants to be dark but can’t resist the light.

30 Rock (Five) proved a far sassier, flintier debut. Like Californication, this was another show about a writer, the embattled head writer of a comedy sketch show played by Tina Fey – who is also the writer of 30 Rock itself. Alec Baldwin is wickedly brilliant as her character Liz’s new boss, Jack Donaghy, the head of entertainment for the network; a smooth monster who wrecks all around him while in the guise of offering help.

Fey skewers the blurry corporate conglomerations in the entertainment world. Baldwin’s character is not famous for overseeing top comedies, but rather a tri-vection oven that can cook a turkey in 22 minutes. “Sometimes you have to change things that are perfectly good to make them your own,” he insists. What a deliciously shape-shifting snake he is.

Liz is horrified when Donaghy makes her sign up a new comic, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), for The Girlie Show: he is foul-mouthed, bombastic and loud. But, after a bonding lunch (where Tracy insists “white dudes inject chicken nuggets with Aids”) and then a visit to a strip club (she gives the strippers money towards a college education) he agrees to join the show.

30 Rock has just won Best Comedy at the Emmys and deservedly so. The script crackles with invention, and isn’t a tired retread of other TV shows about TV shows such as the recent dud, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. This week, in the writers’ room, Liz had to throw out a joke about Michael Jackson. “Apparently you can’t say he’s got a vagina,” she said, peeved.