The Top Gun series received generous support from the US Navy because it was such an effective recruitment tool. I wonder if something similar went on between the CIA and Netflix’s new series The Recruit, this time as an exercise in reputation management.

‘There’s nothing sinister or threatening about the Company,’ this bizarre, horribly ill-judged and tasteless comedy/thriller series squeals at every turn. ‘We’re just a bunch of lovable, kooky misfits doing our bit to defend your freedoms.’

If you think I’m exaggerating, consider that one of the biggest baddies in the series – right up there with the evil Russians – is the Senate oversight committee responsible for holding the CIA to account. R-i-g-h-t. So in The Recruit’s perfect world, the CIA would just be allowed to do whatever the hell it wanted, unimpeded by pesky scrutiny on behalf of the taxpayers who fund it?

But perhaps I’m prejudiced. I’ve hated the comedy/thriller genre since the days of the A-Team. I’m not saying it can’t work: I think the Kingsman series got the balance between mirth and violent death more or less right. But the danger with splicing these two disparate genres, as here, is that you end up with grisly mishmash where the serious bits undermine the supposedly funny ones and vice versa.

The hero Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) is a twentysomething lawyer who, for some unaccountable reason, and apparently with no vetting, has landed a job at the CIA. Despite being a total rookie, he is given astonishing freedom by his enigmatic boss to do whatever he wants, on one occasion jetting off at the drop of a hat to the Yemen to visit a remote, special ops base in the desert. Because he looks so clueless and goofy he is suspected of being a spy and has one of his fingernails pulled out with a pair of pliers.

Instead of ending the series there and then, we will now be forced – probably worse than waterboarding, I fear – to endure the full eight episodes

This agonisingly horrible form of torture seems not to bother Hendrix overmuch. (Hey, it’s comedy, remember, kids!). Also, it gives the writer Alexei Hawley a (pitifully threadbare) excuse to insert a bit of backstory. To show his torturers that he is for real he jabbers about how his father was killed in Afghanistan and that this was why he was motivated to do his bit by joining the CIA. Weirdly, these hardened and cynical killers are persuaded by this mawkish biographical detail – which, face it, anyone could have made up on the spot – that he is genuine.

A shame, really, because instead of ending the series there and then, we will now be forced – probably worse than waterboarding, I fear – to endure the full eight episodes. To whet our appetite for the high-octane adventure that is allegedly to follow, the series opens with one of those obligatory flash-forwards to an exciting moment much later in the timeline.

Hendricks is on watch at a military-style base and some rough-looking men in black fatigues have turned up unexpectedly in a convoy of vehicles. He tries to alert his CIA colleagues via radio that something is up but they refuse to take him seriously. But who can blame them? As played by the smug, eminently punchable Centineo with his annoying pretty boy face, the guy is a complete dork who could barely run a bath let alone an intelligence operation.

And herein lies the series’ fundamental problem. Sometimes, Hendricks is required to be a comically inept, fish-out-of-water, almost Mr-Beanish ingénu. But sometimes, when the exigencies of the plot demand it, he suddenly metamorphoses into a quick-thinking lawyer with an uncanny knack for talking his way out of trouble.

This leaves the viewer quite unable to decide how to relate to each scene. When, say, Hendricks goes to visit a sexy, Russian ex-agent (Laura Haddock) in her maximum security prison and they form an unlikely alliance, are we supposed to take this utter tosh seriously? Or are we suppose to nod knowingly and recognise it as a satire on a well-worn, second-rate TV spy drama cliche?

I fear, sadly, that it is the former. The Recruit is quite unaware of just how bad it is.