Fall TV: Remade in the USA

God bless the American TV industry! While the rest of corporate America is outsourcing, this fall television is aggressively insourcing, remaking several shows from other countries and populating them with red-blooded Americans.

This is, of course, not a brand-new programming strategy: All in the Family was adapted from a British show, reality hits from American Idol to Survivor have overseas DNA, and Ugly Betty and The Office are remakes of international hits, while CBS ran the made-in-Canada cop show Flashpoint this summer.

With a good half a dozen new imports this fall alone, American TV is becoming a diversified global marketplace. But with every Toyota and Lexus, this season shows, you're going to get a few Yugos.

NBC's Aussie adaptation Kath and Kim (Thursdays, 8:30 p.m. E.T.; debuts Oct. 9) is the new import with the highest profile, partly because NBC needs a hit badly and partly because NBC's new chief, Ben Silverman, was behind the successful importation of The Office and Ugly Betty. Kath and Kim, though, shows that, as with Vegemite, not all flavors are so easily translated. The premise is the same as the original: single fortysomething Kath (Molly Shannon) has her life disrupted when her dim-bulb daughter Kim (Selma Blair) leaves her husband and shows up at Kath's doorstep. Like the British Absolutely Fabulous, it's a comedy of grotesques; Kath is a clueless ninny, Kim a crass, inarticulate walking id.

AbFab pulled this off by reveling in its characters' crudeness. NBC's Kath simply smugly insults them — for their clothes, their pop-culture obsessiveness, their eating at Applebee's. It's sneering and unwatchably badly written; it shoots at fish in a barrel and still manages to miss. On NBC's My Name Is Earl, by comparison, Jaime Pressley's Joy may be a moron, but she's an interesting one, with a kind of admirably feral greed. Blair's Kim is just a cartoon idiot. ("It's over!" she declares about her marriage. "O-V-U-R!") If you can't even make your characters believably dumb, you've got problems, and while Shannon does her best with what she's given, the mother-daughter dialogue plays like bad Oscar-presenter patter.

CBS, meanwhile, has two very funny British imports. Sadly, only one is a comedy. CBS's adapted Britcom Worst Week (Mondays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.) has a much easier premise to sell to Yanks, mainly because it's pretty much lifted from a Ben Stiller movie: hapless Sam (Kyle Bornheimer), just engaged, tries to impress his future in-laws, but every attempt ends up disastrously. (In the first episode, he accidentally convinces his wife's family that her father is dead, a social faux pas in most cultures.) It's game if unambitious, with plenty of misunderstandings and physical comedy that involve the violation of poultry. By the second episode, there are signs that the premise may not sustain for long (the title, after all, gives it only a week), but it still shows that a good pratfall is the universal language.

In the drama Eleventh Hour (Thursdays, 10 p.m. E.T.; debuts Oct. 9), meanwhile, genius biophysicist Jacob Hood (Rufus Sewell) advises government agents investigating cases of science gone too far, be they in genetic science or homeopathic drugs (no, really). As is mandatory in the House era, Hood is brilliant, eccentric and an irritant. "He's got this annoying habit of telling the truth," an associate says straight-faced, "and the truth hits a lot of people's pockets." Simultaneously gross and sanctimonious, this histrionic science procedural is mainly a warning against the cloning of TV concepts.

Speaking of gross, HBO's Little Britain USA (Sundays, 10:30 p.m. E.T.) is the one import this fall to retain its original cast, and it bets confidently that Yanks and redcoats alike can be united by the love of a good penis joke. Comics Matt Lucas and David Walliams transport the characters from their BBC sketch show, while adding a few American originals. But their new characters don't measure up, and the original British ones — like Lucas as thick-accented juvenile delinquent Vicky Pollard — are so culturally specific that they translate to being plopped inexplicably into American settings here like spotted dick on a McDonald's dollar menu. (Except that spotted dick is funnier.)