The Book Group bears all the hallmarks of the cult comedy Channel 4 is so adept at churning out: brilliantly rendered larger-than-life characters, of and lashings of surreal humour. It is odd, then, that The Book Group hasn't followed its channel-mates Spaced, Peep Show and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace in achieving the same level of after-the-event popularity.

Anne Dudek – perhaps more familiar for her role as Dr. Amber Volakis in House –  is  neurotic, socially awkward Clare Pettengill, an American woman recently arrived in Glasgow who sets up a book group hoping to make some like-minded friends.

Expecting to meet people as intelligent and interested in literature as she is, Clare is surprised and not a little annoyed to have her living room populated with a cast of oddities: a trio of football wives (headed by Michelle Gomez's Janice), Barney – an arrogant postgraduate student (James Lance), Kenny – a sensitive wheelchair-bound budding writer and unemployed Rab, who attends the group to get close to Janice's husband – his sporting hero and love interest.

Clare's attempts to discuss the week's book – from which the episode takes its title – are constantly frustrated by the intrusion of the ups and downs of lives of those in the group.

Coming from a huge range of backgrounds, the group form a loveable if oddly disparate bunch, supporting each other through death, divorce and everything else that life has to throw at them.

At the same time, however, The Book Group has a constant undercurrent of sadness to it: each of the characters is intensely lonely in their own way – Clare struggling to make her way in a strange country, Barney trying to escape the clutches of his heroin addiction and Kenny, who struggles to find love despite being the object of desire of the group's women.  The episodes – the last in particular – are never tied up neatly and end on uncomfortably open-ended note.As in Wedding Belles, Gomez is sensational: Janice is the group's mother hen, but nevetheless goes on the biggest journey of all characters, going from bored housewife to intrepid journalist to MSP across the twelve episodes, falling in love with her bisexual husband's male lover along the way.

Writer Annie Griffin has produced one of the most endearing but also darkly funniest examinations of life in modern Scotland that by no means deserves the obscurity that it has suffered from so far.