I almost exclusively watch sitcoms on TV and so my TV watching gets less every year.
I was so hoping this would be fun. It was bad. Really bad.
Selma: Although I still lust after you, you need to be aware that you can no longer pull off the short tops.
Molly Shannon: Bleah.
Usually I just record the entire block from 8-10, but this was so bad I may have to take it out of the loop and record 8-8:30 and 9-10.
Did anyone else catch it? Anyone like better than I did?
I’m pretty sure that was done intentionally. I watched, i couldn’t stand it for very long. Not a single laugh the entire show.
I wonder why Tom Shales liked it so much. Maybe he was distracted, as I was, by how hot Shannon and Blair are.
*This time, it’s NBC’s Americanized version of “Kath & Kim,” a fantastically funny Australian comedy that goes into the record books on these shores as a contender for worst remake ever.
NBC sent the first two episodes of “Kath & Kim,” and both were jaw-dropping in their awfulness.*
From here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/06/DDME13BMAD.DTL
It was awful, a slap in the face to the Aussie version (which was genius).
I noticed that Gina Riley and Jane ? the originators of the AU version were listed as producers. Difficult to believe.
I haven’t yet heard a single good review - but saw on TV last night that they are going to be running the US version here in Australia - how that makes sense given the original one (hugely funny) is iconic here - how can it do anything but fall flat?
I watched it on the basis of the commercials where the actress playing Kim seemed to wear nothing but very short shorts and tops, both of which appeared to have been applied with a spray can.
Halfway through the show, I decided that even those weren’t worth having to put up with the insipid dialog and so-called plot.
Jane Turner.
Yeah, it was pretty bad. No Sharon? No silly malapropisms? (“I want to be effluent, mum!”) The most important aspect, for me, of the original was the introspection, and the gentle good humour when ‘ordinary Aussies’ did ridiculous things in pursuit of the Great Australian Dream.
Maybe Riley and Turner were happy enough to put their names on the US version, for the right price, and just cut their losses, forgot about expecting great things from the remake.
I might have enjoyed it more if I could have accepted, even a tiny bit, that Molly Shannon is old enough to be Selma Blair’s mother. As they’re only 8 years apart, I found it impossible.
On second thought, even if I could have accepted that, it still would have sucked. I did enjoy John Michael Higgins, though.
I caught it and I found it amusing enough. I’m gonna give next weeks episode a try.
Jane Turner is six months older than Gina Riley. So they’ve increased the age difference.
To quote my duaghter:
“I don’t know how they did it, but somehow someone managed to make Molly Shannon the more intelligent, mature, sympathetic character.”
I thought it was horrible. I’m ok with Selma’s character being annoying and childish, but she’s not nearly hot enough for that, nor was it funny in the least bit.
I turned it off after a few minutes, even though I, too, lust after Selma Blair and had been surprised to see her in it. It just stunk.
It was really bad. Horrible even. I don’t even know what they were going for.
Dumb maybe? Really, really dumb?
I just saw the end of it on Aussie TV. Really indescribably poorly done. Mind you I only stuck with the Aussie original for 2 or 3 episodes and then the “joke” wore pretty thin but at least you felt that the writers and cast liked the characters.
When are US TV producers going to learn that certain shows (The Office, Kath & Kim…) work because they have something special that works at that specific moment. You can’t re-create that.
You can’t just give someones script to someone else, or re-cast people and have it be as brilliant as what the originals created.
Things work for a reason, and it’s not just a script or a character bio.
What does that mean?
Mmm, noice!
Does the Australian one air in the US anywhere? Has it? Maybe cable?
I’m not sure it’d work either, because the references would be unfamiliar - some of them, that is. I’m talking about the US generally though - I could see a significant Doper following.
Most of the Aussies I know seem to put Kath & Kim on the same pedastal that we reserve for shows like Mash and Seinfeld, and it’s a shame that the TV networks feel they have to Americanize it for it to work. The rest of the world gets our shit pretty much straight (though sometimes dubbed), and they manage to put up with random cultural references that no one in that country would get, and the shows still do really well.
Do networks really think it would be so intolerable for Joe Couch Potato to use a tiny bit of gray matter and extrapolate what a dag or westie is?