• Little Britain USA, 10:30-11 p.m. Sunday, HBO

• The Life & Times of Tim, 11-11:30 p.m. Sunday, HBO

That slogan ''It's not TV, it's HBO'' has acquired an ironic ring the past couple of years as the network's programming went from can't-miss to can't-watch. Gourmet dishes like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood and Rome have been replaced with video equivalents of E. coli like Tell Me You Love Me and Lucky Louie.

True Blood, the redneck vampire romp that kicked off earlier this month, offers some hope that HBO has gotten back on track with its dramas. But Little Britain USA and The Life & Times of Tim, which debut tonight, indicate that the comedies still have a long way to go.

The Life & Times of Tim is a decidedly adult cartoon created by Steve Dildarian, an advertising copywriter apparently intent on compiling the world's most bizarre résumé -- he's famous in the industry for inventing the Budweiser lizards. Imagine Ray Romano as an animated character with a potty mouth and you've got Tim, a phlegmatic, ineffectual and perpetually victimized corporate drone whose life bobs from crisis to crisis.

His girlfriend comes home early from a cruise with her parents and catches him with a hooker. (The girlfriend is unimpressed by his defense: ''I vacuumed.'') He goes to a bachelor party, but all the strippers have called in sick. Told by his bosses to pretend he's Mexican to improve the company's diversity statistics, he blows it when he's asked to speak at a minority business conference and can offer only half-remembered phrases from high-school Spanish: ``Where is the bathroom? The bathroom is good. Chicken and rice. Thank you. Hi.''

This is sporadically funny, but Tim is too slight -- the back-to-back episodes are only 10 to 12 minutes long -- and relies way too much on the supposed shock value of cartoon characters uttering four-letter words to be consistently entertaining. Um, fellows? The guys on South Park once used the S-word 162 times in a single episode, which pretty much exhausted the comic possibilities. Well, unless you got the Budweiser lizards involved. . . .

Potty-talk shock is also much at the heart of HBO's other new comedy, Little Britain USA, though give the show credit for variety: There are foul-mouthed summer-camp kids, foul-mouthed Cub Scouts, foul-mouthed astronauts and foul-mouthed cocker spaniels, and that's just in the first episode.

This collection of comic skits is an American adaptation of a BBC show, and its origins in the broad (some would say low) humor of the British music hall are unmistakable: Fat guys with teeny weenies. Grandmas with crack pipes. Transvestites with large Adam's apples. And 192 jokes per minute about homosexuality. (Boorish leader of a weight-loss support group to Rosie O'Donnell: ``Did you find it hard to get a man because of the weight and then think, `Maybe I'll go lezzie'?'')

With that degree of sophistication, it should come as no surprise that in Great Britain the show's wildest popularity was with grade-school kids. If you think SpongeBob Squarepants would be funnier if it added a couple of hookers and a cross-dressing junkie, this is the show for you. Everybody else should take a pass.

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