• Knight Rider, 8-9 p.m. Wednesday, WTVJ-NBC 6

• Gary Unmarried, 8:30-9 p.m. Wednesday, WFOR-CBS 4

The past is not dead, William Faulkner once said, it's on NBC and CBS. OK, he probably didn't (everybody knows Faulkner hardly watched anything but Animal Planet, Soapnet and WWE Smackdown!) but I'm saying it; and if you're so foolish as to turn on the tube Wednesday night, you will too.

Both networks are offering us fall lineups composed almost exclusively of remakes and rip-offs, and the trend continues with NBC's Knight Rider -- a remake of a godawful '80s sci-fi show that somehow manages to be even godawfuler -- and CBS' Gary Unmarried, yet another in the net's apparently inexhaustible supply of sitcoms about the good times of divorce.

Gary Unmarried stars veteran comedian Jay Mohr as a newly divorced house painter who's about to start dating again. The obstacles include his two nerdy, needy teenagers -- a boy who's afraid of girls, and a girl with a creepy fixation on Al Gore -- and a political-correctness Nazi of an ex-wife (Paula Marshall, Californication). She likes to put the kids on fruit-juice-only ''cleansing'' fasts; he greets them with a shouted, ''Throw away your books, get rid of your toothbrushes, you're with daddy now.'' Yes, you are correct: Gary Unmarried is the bastard child (excuse me, undocumented offspring) of Two And A Half Men and The New Adventures Of Old Christine.

Mohr radiates a kind of genial macho as a guy who's got nothing but beer and ranch dressing in the refrigerator and is attracted to women with pink skulls tattooed on their butts, and it plays well off the brittle Marshall, who thinks adulthood is all about having a broomstick up your rear.

But Gary Unmarried is fatally overloaded with silly contrivances: Not only does Marshall turn out to be having an affair with their marriage counselor, but Mohr and his new girlfriend seek the man's relationship advice. It's hard to enjoy characters in such dire need of a hard slapping.

`KNIGHT RIDER'

Speaking of hard slapping, I'm paying a bounty of $5 per vicious blow administered to the heads of any NBC executive involved in any way with Knight Rider, which cost me an hour of my life and 50 IQ points that I'll never get back. The first version of this show, which ran from 1982 to 1986, is mostly remembered for its infliction of David Hasselhoff on an unwitting public. The second one rises to the status of a Geneva Convention violation, a genocidal assault on American brain cells.

Hasselhoff's role this time around is filled by Justin Bruening, a once and future star of All My Children, who plays a crimebuster with a talking car that can also jump, fly, see through walls, blow things up, turn itself into a pickup truck and do the Macarena. Full of car chases, fistfights and women in low-cut evening gowns kicking the crap out of people, edited to make MTV look like a Czech art film of people sleeping, it doesn't even make a pretense of an intelligible script, just a collection of random explosions and crashes spliced together by monkeys working for banana slices. Watching is like having red-hot needles thrust into your [insert the appalling orifice of your choice here]. If the past won't die, maybe we should drive a stake through its heart.

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