I honestly can’t with the fucking hubris of Americans, how they look at TV shows that other countries have done and go, ‘Oh yeah, cool. That’s a great concept, but we can do it better!’ Like that time when they tried to do an American version of our national treasure telly series, Kath & Kim, and, to quote the Foxymorons themselves, it was REVOLTING.
It actually surprises me how many people are not aware of the fact that a U.S. version of Kath & Kim exists, not because it was groundbreaking or anything, but because it was so fkn abysmal, that its ungodly presence on this earth still sends shockwaves through the Kath & Kim fandom.
So basically the tl;dr version is that NBC got wind of the beloved Aussie series back in 2008 and crafted their own version featuring the same name, the same concept and the same slang and terminology as our Kath & Kim.
Despite securing a stellar cast, featuring celebrated comedian Molly Shannon as Kath and the legendary Selma Blair as Kim, the project was doomed from the start for the plain fact that although the actresses were god tier, they were not Jane Turner and Gina Riley and therefore had no hope in hell of recreating the magic formula that went into bringing our two Foxymorons to life.
But also, the ‘yumour of Kath & Kim is rooted in its innate Aussie-ness and the way it nailed the true blue culture using classic Australian slang (words like tizzy, toot etc) and, ofc, their pronunciations, so hearing their iconic phrases rattled out in an American accent was just plain wrong.
Have a watch of the clip below and you’ll see just what I mean:
I need to wash my eyes and ears after witnessing that. Hell, I need a deep-clean of my bloody brain, if that’s at all possible.
Here’s a nice palette cleanser to sooth our aching souls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYE2PQDcUbY
The show bombed so hard, both in Australia and in the States, that the local network pulled it after the second episode, then NBC subsequently canned the series altogether after one season, which was the right move, I feel.
Now that we’ve reached the end of this article, let’s never ever ever speak of this again. Instead, go binge the ONLY REAL Kath & Kim on Netflix, ploise.
