Shannon goes zany on NBC’s ‘Kath & Kim’

By Frazier Moore

The former ‘SNL’ star is still getting to know her character.

NEW YORK — Picking a daughter is a difficult task. It’s especially tough when the daughter is Kim, a Doritos-scarfing princess of suburbia who’s tethered by co-dependency (and an ampersand) to her mom Kath on the new NBC comedy “Kath & Kim.”

Molly Shannon was a shoo-in to play 40-ish firecracker Kath in this U.S. version of the Australian hit. But finding the right actress for peevish, midriff-flaunting Kim wasn’t such a snap.

“So many people came in,” Shannon recalled during a recent interview near her New York apartment. “I would fly out to LA and read with them: So many talented people!” And it mirrored her own past. “I had so many years of rejection, I could feel for all of them.”

Of course, the lean years for Shannon ended in 1995 with NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” where she flourished for six seasons.

Now Shannon’s hopes are high for “Kath & Kim,” whose second episode airs 8:30 p.m. Thursday. She stars alongside Selma Blair, who demonstrates that considering anyone else for the role was a waste of everybody’s time.

The 36-year-old Blair (with films that include “Legally Blonde,” “Hellboy” and its sequel) gets a hearty vote of confidence from Shannon, who credits her with “a funny darkness. And she’s very strong and fearless.”

She’s hilarious as the trashy self-proclaimed “trophy wife” who has walked out on Craig (Mikey Day), her husband-dude of six weeks, because he won’t take her to Applebee’s for dinner every night, and moves back home with Kath.

As Kath, meanwhile, Shannon is a comic salvo of pluckiness and shopping-mall chic. Kath is a striver whose latest mark of success is her romance with Phil (John Michael Higgins), the smarmy sandwich-shop owner who Kim views dimly as a rival for her mother’s affection.

“I think of Kath as someone who really tries, who’s a survivor,” says Shannon over a salad and a shot-and-a-half iced cappuccino. “She’s trying to seem smarter or fancier than she really is.” Also younger: Bonding with Kim more like a sister than a mom, Kath is committed to defying her age, among a host of other inconvenient truths.

“You, Kath Day, are happy,” Kath decrees, mantralike, her defensive grin in place. “Happiness comes to you easily and effortlessly.” As long as she works at it hard enough.

“I’m still learning about her,” says Shannon, elaborating in rapid-fire bursts, “since I come from a place like ‘Saturday Night’ where I created my own characters and I know them inside and out and they came from me and my family and my childhood. With this character, I’m still finding my place in it, and what I can bring to it from my own experience.”

Until now, the 44-year-old native of Shaker Heights, Ohio, has perhaps been best known for self-styled characters on “SNL” such as joyologist Helen Madden, unitard-clad former dancer Sally O’Malley and, of course, Mary Katherine Gallagher, the geeky Catholic schoolgirl with a habit of sniffing her armpits. She also put her own zany spin on celebs such as Monica Lewinsky, Elizabeth Taylor and Courtney Love.

But in 2001, she decided it was time to go.

“Good endings are really important to me. I wanted to leave with the same joy that I came into the show with,” Shannon says. “And I did.”

She moved on to films including “Year of the Dog” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” as well as a short-lived comedy series “Cracking Up” and a recurring role on “Will & Grace.”

She also married painter Fritz Chesnut, with whom she has two kids, Stella, 5, and Nolan, 31‚Ñ2.