No one else is going to do it. So I will.

I would like to take this moment to deeply apologize to everyone in Australia. Please understand we have little control over what television executives do. If there had been ANY opportunity to stop the NBC brass from butchering your very popular comedy series "Kath & Kim," it would have been taken. But now that the American version is hitting the network schedule tonight, the best that can be offered is a sincere "I am so sorry."

In the fine tradition of NBC's botched attempt to make an American version of the British comedy "Coupling" comes "Kath & Kim." Molly Shannon, who has not been funny since she left "Saturday Night Live," and Selma Blair, who has not been funny ... well never, play mother and daughter. The humor is supposed to come from their dysfunctional relationship. At least that was what we were told.

Shannon is Kath, a cougar without any claws. She has started a new chapter in her lower middle-class life now that her daughter, Kim, has married. But wait, there is trouble afoot. Kim didn't realize married life wasn't just a nightly trip to Applebee's. There's all this cooking and cleaning her husband expects her to do. So she goes back home.

There will be a 15 second pause to allow you to recover from all the laughter. Hmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm, hmmm. That should do it.

Shannon, who at one time might have been considered a superstar, and Blair are the worst casting since Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in "Othello." OK. The governor really didn't star in "Othello." But there was no real casting bad enough with which to compare "Kath & Kim."

The joke about Kim being a trophy wife isn't funny the first time. And trying to milk that role for laughs is fruitless. Shannon tries to play Kath as a cockeyed optimist. But fails with a grandness rarely seen in television or film.

"Kath & Kim" is not just bad TV. It is the new yardstick for measuring bad TV. And short of a series where, lets says, Johnny Knoxville plays a blind brain surgeon who works evenings as a male stripper to support his addiction to dryer lint, there will be few contenders to television's answer to an infected gapping head wound that is "Kath & Kim."