Like Kim, who in the American version will be played by Selma Blair, "I grew up with a single mom," said Nader, who's from South Philadelphia and now has a 4-year-old son of her own. And like Kath (Molly Shannon), Nader's mother, Diane, was young when she had her.

"I think she was 19 when she had me, so we grew up together," Nader, who graduated from St. Maria Goretti and Penn, said this week. "And in those kinds of situations, you're the mother sometimes and you're the daughter sometimes, and we're still like that because we're still the same age. It doesn't change as you get older."

Thanks both to the writers strike and a change in the way NBC's producing its shows for the coming season, TV critics haven't yet seen more than a few clips of most of the network's schedule, including "Kath & Kim," which is apparently about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, Blair playing a little younger than her true age, Shannon a little older.

In the Australian version, Nader noted, the actresses are about the same age.

In one of the more unusual arrangements in television, Ben Silverman, the entertainment co-chairman of NBC, is also one of Nader's fellow executive producers on "Kath & Kim," courtesy of a deal he made to remake the show while he was still head of the production company Reveille, where he earned similar credits on shows like NBC's "The Office" and ABC's "Ugly Betty."

"Ben and [NBC executive vice president] Teri Weinberg have been passionate about 'Kath & Kim' for, I think it's about five years," Nader said. "They tried to get it five years ago, and it's been sort of a long process," by which time they'd both come to NBC.

As to whether it's easier or harder to have one of your producers also heading your network, "it's all hard," said Nader, who, according to the Hollywood Reporter, recently signed a two-year, seven-figure deal with Universal Media Studios. "The thing about a television show now, and a comedy especially, it's very hard to get it off the ground . . . To have support internally, from the network as well as the studio, has been an amazing thing for us. They really believe in the show and they want it to work."

Nader got her start on "Caroline in the City" and went on to work on a number of comedies, including "Spin City" and "King of Queens." She's the second writer to have been attached to the project.

"I had written a pilot about my life, about South Philadelphia. Because my grandmother was basically a single mother, too," she said. "So in the pilot, I come back with my kid to my house in South Philadelphia to live with my mother and her mother. So that's the pilot that I wrote that Terri Weinberg" thought made her perfect to write "Kath & Kim."

"Then the strike happened," she said. "It took like a year to cast it, so that was a really long, long process. We got Molly first. I had written it for Molly, because I had seen her in a pilot the year before, and then for Selma, that part of Kim is really hard, because some people might think of her as like, you know, really bratty, and why are we going to like this character?

"It was like a Scarlett O'Hara kind of thing, like everybody tried out for the part and she came in and nailed it."

It's hard to tell much from the brief clips screened for critics, but it's probably safe to say that neither Kath nor Kim is a subdued dresser.

Nader, who grew up not far from Geno's and Pat's Steaks, can relate.

"I was actually Miss Geno's Steak during my heyday," she said, laughing.

"I did a commercial for Geno's Steaks, full on, like 'Kath & Kim,' like fake nails, fur coat. I was, like, probably 14, 15." *

Ellen Gray is covering the Television Critics Association's summer meetings. Read more at go.philly.com/ellengray or send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.