Mindy needs to shape up fast

The funny woman was once a rarity in the world of television.

There have been female characters in comedies for decades, but they were almost always, well, just "the girl".

While past sitcoms like Ellen, Murphy Brown and Pearl starred female leads, it was only really in the mid-2000s that women hit the jackpot in the world of sitcoms.

It was Tina Fey who got the ball rolling with 30 Rock, which follows the misadventures of TV executive Liz Lemon.

Since then, there have been, among others, Amy Poehler with Parks and Recreation, Whitney Cummings with Whitney and now Mindy Kaling with The Mindy Project.

Kaling, who previously starred in the US version of The Office as Kelly, plays a doctor named Mindy Lahiri who wishes her life was a Hollywood romcom. She's a talkative, petulant social disaster.

The show starts off with Mindy being arrested after giving an embarrassing drunken speech at her ex's wedding before having an argument with a Barbie doll. That's right. Mindy is a mess.

We follow her as she tries not to scare guys away and battles to be taken seriously at work.

Unlike Fey's Liz Lemon or Poehler's Leslie Knopes, Kaling's Mindy is a little difficult to understand. You know she's a nutter, but you can't figure out whether she's misunderstood or just a horrible person.

The same goes for the show. It's not rubbish, but it could be so much better if it didn't try so hard to be "a quirky comedy".

The Mindy Project looks promising, but in a market where brilliant comedy is on tap, it needs to figure itself out fast or the fickle TV viewer will soon change the channel.

• 'The Mindy Project' starts on Tuesday at 7.30pm, M-Net Series (114).