Newsroom spoof Dog Bites Man features Andrea Savage, left, A.D. Miles, Zach Galifianakis and, in front, Matt Walsh. It debuts on the Comedy Network tonight.

Satire is a delicate and difficult beast. Done well, it cuts like a finely honed steel blade. Done poorly, it beats you over the head like a wooden mallet.

The Office is probably the best example of effective satire currently on the tube. It works because it takes the reality of white collar drudgery, clueless bosses and insane coworkers and heightens it just enough that it's funny without being silly.

When The Newsroom wasn't spinning off on some Finklemaniacal tangent, it was also brilliant satire, poking holes in the inflated egos of newsmakers and the spin-doctoring of news networks.

Dog Bites Man, a Comedy Central series making its Canadian debut tonight at 10 on the Comedy Network, feels like a blend of The Office and The Newsroom. Trouble is, it's funny only in short bursts. Too much mallet, not enough knife.

The series is a mockumentary about a fictional TV news outfit in Spokane, Wash., staffed by a team of sitcom-friendly extreme characters: The preening but insecure reporter (Daily Show alumnus Matt Walsh), the ambitious but morally bankrupt producer (Andrea Savage), the slovenly and tactless director (Zach Galifianakis) and the dorky, know-it-all production assistant (A.D. Miles.)

The first episode opens with Walsh's Kevin Beekin and Savage's Tillie Sullivan reacquainting awkwardly; there was a previous workplace relationship between the two that Tillie doesn't want to acknowledge but that Beekin is desperate to rekindle. Think Michael and Jan on The Office.

That segues to a seminar on sexual harassment (geez, are they just cribbing entire scripts from NBC's show?) with Beekin asking obviously non-hypothetical questions about a "friend" who slept with a coworker. "He was like a stallion, just kept going and going," he says. "Which a lot of women don't like," Tillie retorts.

The trouble with Dog Bites Man is that the characters aren't just charmingly flawed, they're totally irredeemable. Even Tillie, who seems like she might be the "normal" one at the station, has no problem going along with an idea to fake a murder at a bodybuilding competition when her assigned story doesn't pan out.

The show is semi-improvised, which may be part of the problem. Good improv comedy on stage is golden. Good improv comedy on TV (and this cast is very good indeed) often just feels like the writers are working from a rough draft.

The TV news business is such a rich target to lampoon that they don't need to resort to extremes to do it. Seeing the team end up in the wrong state when chasing a missing girl story, as happens in a later episode, is funny. Seeing them con random strangers into pretending they're relatives of the missing girl so the station can get an exclusive interview is silly.

And when the episode veers off into a tangent that has Galifianakis's character casting actors for a recreation of the crime, settling on an opera singer and a guy with a stutter ...well, maybe it sounded good on paper. But it just doesn't work.

There are laughs to be had in Dog Bites Man, but because of its resemblances to The Office, it's doomed to be compared to that show's meticulously written scripts and subtle character development. And its bark is worse than its bite.