Kath & Kim

Kath & Kim

Kath & Kim is a character-driven Australian television situation comedy series. The series was created by, and is written by Jane Turner and Gina Riley who play the title characters: a suburban mother and daughter with a dysfunctional relationship. The series main characters consist of Kath Day-Knight, a cheerful 50-year-old woman, her self-indulgent daughter Kim Craig, Kath's boyfriend and second husband, the metrosexual Kel Knight, as well as Kim's estranged husband Brett Craig and her lonely, overweight "second best friend" Sharon Strzelecki. The series is set in the fictional suburb of Fountain Lakes in Melbourne. It is primarily filmed in Patterson Lakes.

The series was conceived by Turner and Riley in the early 1990s as a weekly segment of the Australian comedy series Fast Forward. The skit was then developed into a full-series. The first series of Kath & Kim premiered on ABC TV on 16 May 2002, with three further series following, while a television movie, entitled Da Kath and Kim Code, was broadcast nationally on 25 November 2005. Kath & Kim has garnered much critical acclaim since its debut, winning two Logie Awards, for "Outstanding Comedy Programme" and the "Best Television Drama Series" award at the Australian Film Institute Awards. In Australia, it has become a pop culture phenomenon, and is a success with audiences nationwide. Internationally, the series has spawned a cult fanbase, and in 2006 it was announced an American version of the series would be produced, to air on NBC. Riley and Turner served as executive producers on the US version. The American version was also picked up by Seven, which debuted the program on 12 October 2008, just three days after its debut in the United States.

The fourth series of Kath & Kim began airing on the Seven Network on 19 August 2007, due to contract expiring with ABC. The first episode of series four attracted an Australian audience of 2.521 million nationally, the highest rating ever for a first episode in the history of Australian television, until the series premiere of Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities in 2009 with 2.58m viewers.

Despite early reports of a new series to premiere on the Seven Network in 2012, the network announced that instead new introductions will be filmed to rerun old episodes. These will be titled Kath and Kim: The Souvenir Editions.

A feature film based on the series, entitled Kath & Kimderella was released in Australian cinemas on 6 September 2012.