Mark O’Halloran and Lenny Abrahamson’s drama series Prosperity arrived on RTE2 last night, with the broadcaster, for some strange reason, scheduling it against the well-received Fr Michael Cleary documentary. I stuck with Prosperity and in doing so it seems that I missed the better of the two programmes.

As with Adam and Paul, it featured an underclass figure wandering the city, killing time and surviving on scraps of hope and self-delusion. But it missed the movie’s bursts of bleak humour and straightforward slapstick, as well as its shuffling narrative momentum. Instead, it became an increasingly tedious mope through Dublin, featuring random but apparently pointless encounters with threatening characters, and all with no real sense of howthis story will fit into the four-part/same day structure so central to the series.

The acting, it must be said, was excellent, especially that of the lead Siobhán Shanahan. But the characters themselves had little depth and it was hard to avoid the sense that the reason she said so little was because O’Halloran’s script didn’t know what words to put in her mouth.

So what if it carries a Major Social Message, epitomised by the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer title. So what if it strips Dublin of its thin-veneer of gold. It can’t rely on mood alone, when what it desperately needs decent dialogue and an engaging storyline.