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Oh, great, now we have to apologize to Australia.

With American television buying so many premade "formats" - a.k.a. importing shows from other countries and ruining them - the need for saying sorry has increased a hundredfold in just a few years. For every miraculous victory - say, "The Office" or, to a lesser extent, "Ugly Betty" - there are hordes of failures.

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. In fact, by the end of the second episode, a stray thought occurred: Maybe an apology to Australia is unnecessary because the American version misses the mark so badly that it's barely recognizable as a distant cousin to the original. For example, one of the great things about the original "Kath & Kim," a mother-daughter comedy about cluelessness, tackiness, blind hope and failed expectations, is that it found humor in all of its well-drawn characters and situations.

In the American version, there's no humor at all. So there's your first big difference.

And there are no well-drawn characters, either. The American Kath (Molly Shannon) and Kim (Selma Blair) bear almost no resemblance in spirit to their Australian counterparts.

There are, however, endless situations. Much like those grating "Saturday Night Live" skits that go on seemingly and painfully forever, the American "Kath & Kim" is unfunny for prolonged stretches.

Executive producer Michelle Nader makes you wonder if she ever watched the original. If she did, and this is what she came up with, then it's clear that she either didn't get it or knew immediately that it wouldn't work for American television. In that case, she - and NBC - should have left well enough alone. But they didn't. They made Kath and Kim better looking but less interesting and less funny - a trifecta of wrongs.

Shannon, as the mom, Kath, who tries to make the most out of nothing, and Blair, who's completely miscast as daughter Kim, are light-years removed from Jane Turner and Gina Riley, the Australian actresses who created and wrote the original series. Of course, actually creating and writing the series is part of the reason Turner and Riley nail their characters. They inhabit them. They work the angles on what makes Kath and Kim funny: Kath's joyous pursuit of youth and glamour, which she has none of, and Kim's spoiled, wickedly self-involved notions of fame, beauty and happiness. In comparison, Shannon and Blair have none of that creative foundation. They are merely trying to bring life to the embarrassment that Nader has rewritten for them.

Multifront ruin

The ruinous nature of "Kath & Kim" is evident on so many fronts. First, the imbalance between the lives Kath and Kim live in Australia and that which they desire is the essential conflict of their lives. Their failed suburban dreams and the co-dependent spiral of superficiality gave Turner and Riley an abundance of material.

Shannon is able to get down some of the tackiness, translated to American mall culture, but misses pretty much all the other Kathisms. Blair's Kim is merely stock poutiness and insincere anger. It all goes nowhere.

The only part that works is John Michael Higgins ("Best in Show") as Phil, the sandwich shop owner who loves Kath. Higgins is the only one who can nail the goofy heightened reality the show needs because he's done it before in Christopher Guest movies. That kind of humor takes a skill set that pretty much no one else on "Kath & Kim" has. NBC's other Thursday comedy, "My Name Is Earl," is far more adept at pursuing laughs of this nature, and Blair could have taken some cues from Jaime Pressly's Joy character to see how far one must go to get it done right.

Ultimately, the comparisons are pointless because few Americans have seen the original version of "Kath & Kim" anyway. What does matter is that NBC's interpretation is dreadful in its own right. It's a complete wince-inducing mess that makes you feel sorry for Shannon and annoyed at NBC and Nader.