Nothing subtle about 'The Slap'

* THE SLAP. 8 tonight, NBC10.

"Ethnic people slap each other all the time. It's half of reality television."

Mindy Lahiri (Mindy Kaling),

"The Mindy Project"

A SPOILED CHILD, an annoyed adult, a party ruined.

That's the launchpad for NBC's "The Slap," based on Christos Tsiolkas' 2008 novel and an Australian miniseries that followed the cascading consequences of a man publicly disciplining someone else's child.

NBC's eight-episode remake begins tonight and includes actors more associated with film than with network television - Peter Sarsgaard, Thandie Newton, Uma Thurman - and what's possibly the most annoying narration ever.

So annoying, in fact, and so self-consciously literary, that I wonder if Victor Garber's periodic statements of the utterly obvious aren't simply irony that I'm too unsophisticated to appreciate.

Maybe people like me are why NBC can't have nice things.

Still, I have Netflix, where I've seen just enough of the original - which starred Jonathan LaPaglia and Sophie Okonedo - to know something's been lost in translation from a Melbourne suburb to upper-middle-class Brooklyn.

Sarsgaard plays a mid-level public servant - with a cool wife (Newton) and a midlife crush on their baby sitter (Makenzie Leigh) - whose 40th birthday party becomes the setting for a clash of multiple cultures, ranging from his Greek immigrant parents and his nouveau riche cousin Harry (Zachary Quinto) to friends Rosie (Melissa George, who reprises her role in the original) and Gary (Thomas Sadoski) as the parents whose reaction to Harry's slapping their bratty, still-breastfed son sparks all kinds of drama.

Meant to provoke, it's about as subtle as a slap.

In the rarefied world in which most of these characters live and where parenting blogs rule, "The Slap" may well play like "The Crucible."

It's also a "Saturday Night Live" parody waiting to happen.

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