Twitter might be great at some things – like inventing fictional gun massacres and libelling uncharged murder suspects – but on the basis of its reaction to last night's 10 O'Clock Live, it still has plenty of work to do when it comes to considered television reviews. Its users pounced upon 10 O'Clock Live from the very first second: bemoaning the set, the audience, the amount of Lauren Laverne, the lack of Lauren Laverne and Charlie Brooker's haircut. There were even complaints about the presence of a script, which does seem somewhat unfair, what with it being a scripted TV show and all.

The damnation was instant, and it was brutal – but some of the blame for that might lie with Channel 4 itself. There were two crucial factors behind the internet's violent reaction last night: the show's blanket promotion and the recent culling of The Daily Show.

If you've watched Channel 4 at all this year, then you will have seen at least one trailer for 10 O'Clock Live. If you've watched Channel 4 with any regularity, the sight of David Mitchell dropping his mug onto an imaginary desk will be so familiar that it might now be permanently burnt into your retinas. You probably get a floating image of Jimmy Carr's face every time you close your eyes, too. I know I do. And that's not really the sort of thing that would endear anybody to a new series.

And then there's The Daily Show. Rightfully held up as an example of what good topical satire can achieve, Channel 4's recent decision to drop The Daily Show to one episode a week caused untold heartache among its fans. But when the broadcaster tried to justify the move by basically saying, "Hey, it's OK! We're making topical comedy of our own now! I'll be just as good as The Daily Show! It's got Charlie Brooker in it! You like him, don't you?" it made potential fans wary of 10 O'Clock Live before it even began.

All the hype was obviously going to backfire, especially since Channel 4's dedication to topical comedy in recent years has been matched by its general inability to do topical comedy very well. 2008's Tonightly – a show I wrote for, incidentally – demonstrated a certain amount of editorial cowardice by avoiding stories about the looming banking crisis in favour of easy one-liners about penguins and Jason Manford's nan. 2009's TNT came and went without anybody noticing, as did last year's Stand Up For The Week. So historically, 10 O'Clock Live was never going to be immediately perfect.

And, to be fair, it wasn't. The pacing was too frantic – the interviews and debates were conducted at manic full-tilt, as if the show was fearful of boring the audience. Lauren Laverne was badly utilised. There was still a tendency to favour the easy gag. And scheduling it against Question Time and Newsnight seems massively counterproductive.

But, equally, there was buckets of promise. The highlights of the opening episode, essentially Brooker and Mitchell giving audiobook readings of their newspaper columns, allowed for some genuinely refreshing analysis, and the roundtable discussions showed a germ of chemistry between the hosts that will hopefully develop as the weeks progress.

But shows of this nature always need time to find their feet. Over the coming weeks, 10 O'Clock Live will establish a tone and editorial stance that it feels comfortable with. Let's not forget that The Daily Show took four years to find a groove, after all.

So next time Channel 4 decides to launch something like 10 O'Clock Live, hopefully it'll know better than to make such an almighty din about it. Launch it softly. Don't gee everyone up into a caffeinated froth about it. Let it gain an appreciative audience of its own. That way, instead of jumping straight down its throat, Twitter can just get on with doing what it does best, like getting its knickers in a twist about the Daily Mail and describing what it had for lunch.