A British miniseries based on a series of novels, originally broadcast in this country on Masterpiece Theatre about a decade ago, Mapp & Lucia depicts the ongoing struggles of two middle-aged women (Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan) to dominate the upper social circles of a small, seaside English town in the early 1930s. And what a bizarre, inscrutable comedy of manners it is. That's not to say Mapp & Lucia is breathlessly exciting or particularly witty: It's maddeningly slow-paced, frequently boring, and anti-climactic. But this understated treatment, along with its fishbowl setting, ironically heightens the grotesqueness of the pointless charade that is these matrons' single-minded pursuit of social prominence. The whole series has a claustrophobic quality of secrecy and ambiguity; you wait for the facade to crumble, tempers to be lost, and the misanthopy to finally boil over, but it never does, save for a tightly reined-in dressing-down by McEwan to her gossipy friends in the final episode. The lead performances fare better: Scales brings a keenly galumphing presence to her role as the dowdy, vindictive Miss Mapp, and McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne are properly headache-inducing as the pretentious Lucia and her dithering pal. Maybe it's too American to yearn for the deaths of the two matrons in a fiery lorry crash, or a violent uprising by long-suffering servants, or a premature visit by the Luftwaffe, or some other balls-out resolution, but then at least something would happen. Instead, Mapp & Lucia is satire for PBS pledge-break solicitors, undiscriminating Anglophiles, and people with no sense of humor.