HBO’s newest comedy series, Doll & Em, revisits one of TV’s favorite sitcom sub-genres: show business. But this time, the show’s creators, and its stars, are women. The same women…

The co-creators of Doll & Em, a British sitcom made for and initially shown by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky satellite-TV empire, are Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells, who also are its leading ladies, playing loose exaggerations of themselves. The “Em” of the show is well-known to HBO viewers, as the female lead of The Newsroom. “Doll” is a more unknown entity here in the States, though.

Dolly Wells has starred in many British TV series, and appeared in several movies, including Bridget Jones’ Diary. Anglophiles who remember BBC America’s 2008 importation of the satirical anthology series Star Stories may remember Wells well, but not as herself. On that spoof tabloid biography series, she played other celebrities, including Nicole Kidman and Heather Mills (pictured).

But in Doll & Em, while Mortimer plays a variation on herself as a working actress, Wells plays more of a role: the role of a regular person who’s never stepped foot on a movie set. Not, until, she’s invited by her best friend to accept a paid job as her personal assistant.

That’s the premise of Doll & Em, which premieres at 10 p.m. ET Wednesday, and presents two original episodes each week for the rest of March. And it’s a premise that’s played here for more tension than comedy, as the relationship between the two best friends quickly slides into an uneasy tension where everything is a contest, a showdown or an act of submission, humiliation or betrayal.

The setting of Hollywood, and the unusual symbiotic dynamic between a show-biz celebrity and a personal assistant, has inspired TV comedies since… well, since before TV began, because the push-and-pull verbal battles between Jack Benny and his valet, Rochester, were a staple of Benny’s hit radio show even before it transitioned to TV in 1950 with The Jack Benny Program.

And when you think of just Hollywood-inspired comedies, period, on HBO alone you can click off such examples as The Larry Sanders Show, Extras and Entourage. Showtime just completed its latest season of Episodes last week, and other examples abound.

But where Episodes is brilliant, as both satire and character study, Doll & Em is much better at the latter than the former, and is much, much more predictable. But it gets more interesting as it goes on, and this six-episode series could, and should, generate a sequel.