Jun 7, 2015 3 min read

Bravo has a lock on insufferably vapid women, so it makes an odd kind of sense to greenlight a show that makes fun of them.

“Odd Mom Out,” premiering at 10 p.m. Monday, stars its creator, Jill Kargman, as a sort of everyday mom named Jill Weber living in an upper Manhattan world of pretentious airheads, which would include her brother-in-law, Lex (Sean Kleier), sister-in-law, Brooke (Abby Elliott), and mother-in-law, Candace (Joanna Cassidy).

Just as her husband, Andy (Andy Buckley), makes partner at his law firm, his brother closes a deal to introduce bagels to China worth overshadowing millions. Lex’s deal only adds fuel to his wife and mother’s acquisitive fire.

For her part, Jill doesn’t really want to play the game, which makes her the “Odd Mom Out,” but sometimes, she can’t help giving in to the pressure. For one thing, she is trying desperately to get two of her three kids into kindergarten, which involves a rigorous audition process and, of course, an acceptable image.

Her best friend, Dr. Vanessa Wrigley (KK Glick), keeps her grounded, as does Andy, except when he buys into adding a “von” to the family name. Seems the other members of the family did some research and found that the family was always known as the Von Webers in Austria, but the “von” got dropped somehow when they emigrated to the United States.

What was their name in the ’30s and ’40s, Jill asks. Well, they were in Argentina at the time, so that part is unclear.

Get it?

The show is funny and the situations are often quite clever. The third episode reveals that “auditioning” to reserve space in the most discriminating cemetery in New York is even harder than auditioning to get your kids in kindergarten.

The series could be better if it didn’t try quite so hard. The pithy remarks, zingers, desperately clever observations become unrelenting after a while and come close to sucking the oxygen out of the show. At times, the only relief comes from the character of Vanessa Wrigley, whose interactions with Jill have a familiar but welcome Ethel and Lucy quality.

Although the premise of the show is to make fun of real “Real Housewives,” their over-achieving husbands and snobby mothers-in-law, Bravo figures that if you buy into all the “Real Housewives” shows, they’ll give you more of the same but disguise it as a satire.

Jill and Andy Weber, with or without the “von,” may not be rolling in dough and pretension, but they aren’t exactly Jed and all his kin either. For all its cleverness, there’s a danger that “Odd Mom Out” has too narrow a focus, even for fans of “Real Housewives” shows. But in small doses, it’s funny enough.