Critic, criticize thyself III

Today, I've been turning the scalpel (or the hatchet, take your pick) on myself, reviewing my own reviews that appeared in today's paper. This installment: NBC's "Kath & Kim."

Clueless idiocy can be the stuff of inspired comedy - it's been done from the kids' show "Spongebob Squarepants" to the not-for-kids show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia."

The trick is to make characters who are something less than human somehow likable, somehow relatable, or at least convey to viewers that there's a reason you're devoting such energy to telling these clowns' stories. NBC's new sitcom "Kath & Kim," based on a hit Australian sitcom, doesn't manage this. So unless you subscribe to particularly rarefied tastes, you'll likely wonder how this got on the air in the first place.

It's not the fault of the stars. Molly Shannon gives her all as Kath, who has survived years of catering to her utterly spoiled daughter Kim (Selma Blair) and has found happiness with the cloddish owner of a mall fast-food restaurant named Phil Knight (John Michael Higgins). (The real Phil Knight, of course, is considerably less negligible, as he co-founded Nike.)

Kim, on the other hand, is a handful and then some. She returns home pouting, because her husband suggested she pop a couple of frozen dinners in the microwave. "I didn't sign up for cooking dinner or being interested in how someone's day was - I'm a trophy wife," she fumes.

It'd take a particularly deft performer to make a character that monumentally self-absorbed remotely appealing, and Blair's not up to the task.

Complicating the situation is the fact that both Kath and Kim have epochally tacky taste in, well, everything. One would have to be really tone-deaf to the outside world to think that their fashion choices are remotely viable. But they make for a cheap laugh or two, I suppose.

If viewers wouldn't want to spend time with people like this in their real lives, why would they want to watch them on TV? The condescension here is palpable - maybe only Tina Fey's interpretation of Sarah Palin could relate to this stuff.

Even the camera work is off - there's occasional jittery, hand-held business that makes the show look like a documentary, even though it clearly isn't. Despite some genuinely clever one-liners, viewers will likely be too turned off to appreciate them.

*

In these reviews of my reviews, I haven't discussed whether or not I've been empirically correct in my assessments, but historically, I've tended to be in the wheelhouse of critical thought. Today, based on the handful of reviews I've read, the only thing I could be called to the carpet on is that people have only kind of liked "Life on Mars" a little more than I did even if they doubted its longterm viability. But as much as I didn't like "Kath & Kim," calling it nigh unwatchable, it seems everyone else hated it a lot more.

Truth be told, there's not much you can do with a disaster - you can either eviscerate it slowly and painfully, or just dismiss it outright. I tried to give it some benefit of the doubt, but apparently that wasn't necessary. So this review doesn't read as entertainingly as ones where the critics dig right in and tear out its guts.

I wasn't a fan of the Australian version, either, finding it similarly loud and over-the-top, though I attributed it to some cultural disconnect. But maybe I was just right. Maybe it circles the drain, no matter what side of the Equator it's on.

- "Kath & Kim:" 8:30 tonight; NBC Channel 4.