Since the 1960s, there have been 700 police dramas on British television, some of them good, some of them bad, some of them criminal.

So what can another one possibly add? By the look of No Offence (Tuesday, Channel 4, 9pm), not much.

The new show does at least have Paul Abbott as its creator and writer, which is a good start. Abbot created the extraordinary, exhilarating Shameless, which was based on his own chaotic childhood growing up on an estate in Burnley and ran for 11 series until 2013. Although it rather faded in later series, at its height the show was like nothing else on television. It was a comedy drama that tried to shout at you, slap you and snog you at the same. It was dysfunctional television that worked extremely well.

No Offence is much less good, and it's for a number of reasons, some predictable, others less so. For a start: the whole police thing. With so many cop shows that have gone before, there is nothing that even a writer like Abbott can do to make such a familiar genre feel fresh, apart perhaps from making the police officer aliens (except that I see from consulting my list of 700 police dramas, that even that's been done before in a series called Space Precinct in 1994).

Abbot says his plan with No Offence was to take a show like The Bill and adjust it to make it darker, deeper and funnier. He has variously said that No Offence is The Bill heightened by a couple millimetres or tilted sideways, but that has also been done before as recently as last November when James Nesbitt starred in the police comedy/drama Babylon. The idea of police comedies is also nothing new: Rowan Atkinson did a sitcom called The Thin Blue Line in the 1990s and the BBC showed Scot Squad last year.

No Offence also fails to work for another pretty profound reason. When Abbott wrote Shameless, one of its shining merits, amidst all the fags, booze and vomit, was its portrayal of women: they were funny, real and vulgar and used comedy to keep their unpleasant lives at bay; they laughed at darkness. As characters, they also managed to avoid the trap which television drama so often falls into of portraying women as either harridans or harlots.

The women in No Offence are much more clichéd, particularly DI Vivienne Deering played by Joanna Scanlan from The Thick of It. Her speciality is grotesquerie and her sense of humour is always somewhere near the toilet bowl, and to that extent she is a classic Paul Abbott character. But in every other respect she is DI Familiar. She's tough, she takes no nonsense, her job always comes first: they are the qualities of every female television cop of the last 40 years.

So why has Abbott done it? Why, when presumably he could come up with any idea and probably have it commissioned, has he come up with this one? It's probably because as the number of channels has increased in recent years, drama commissioners have lost their nerve in the face of so much competition. Their courage has died and now lies on the slab, cold and blue, like one of the corpses in all those beloved police dramas. And the consequence for us, sadly, is that the long list of 700 police dramas has now grown to 701.