If you have been blithely buried beneath some rubble, you probably don't know what X Factor is. I'm sorry. I can't help atone for any consequent guilt you're feeling for not knowing about One Of The Most Amazing Spectacles This Increasingly Yellowing Earth Has Ever Experienced...Ever. I can, however, provide a shortcut for you to catch up, by way of some back-alley blather that's transpiring about Fox's stab at Americanizing the British talent show. A mogul whose retinas are tattooed with dollar signs, Simon Cowell is the one who basically made another Simon (the one who cobbled the Spice Girls together in 1994) irrelevant. He did this by ripping off the formula for the latter's worldwide Idol franchise and tweaking it enough to avoid litigation, consequently expelling X Factor through his creative coochie snorcher.

And now Cowell and Fox have teamed up to mutate this into something that Americans can fall in love with, perhaps on an American Idol off-season. However, we need that off-season to recuperate, to digest the alums of the past season. So this seems predestined for failure, mainly because the niche of "televised singing competition" remains filled in the US.

Why you may peripherally know X Factor: Leona Lewis, the young lady hired to replace her when we weary of Lewis, and of course Jedward. Add to that judges that, past or present, have included Sharon Osbourne, Cheryl Cole, and Kylie Minogue's kid sister--all cast as foils to Simon Cowell. Essentially, you have the apex of televised singing competitions, riding high on campy star power and spurring cultural dialogue.

American Idol fills a similar role on our TVs. Despite having pulled a fast one on us for the better part of eight years, having its pop star position fulfilled by a hysterical has-been with little current currency as an actual performer. Then, following her firing, producers reasonably realized that on a show about grooming the nation's next pop star, they needn't actually have a pop star weigh in. Details, shmetails. And so, Abdul's vacancy was filled with decidedly non-singing personality Ellen. Who, to her credit, is capable of bringing whimsy in the vacuum created by Abdul's departure. Thereby keeping the show's hold on our attention tight.

There may be talk of Idol's decline, but it'll still rank as an Ivy League, while on its debut, an Americanized X Factor will have whiffs of an experimental new hippie college where organic snickerdoodles are handed out in lieu of diplomas.

Fundamentally X Factor's probable failure to translate boils down to this: We, as faithful viewers, have issues with loyalty. As a rule, we don't enjoy tweaking our TV diets to add new, foreign shows. Especially when they closely resemble what we're already consuming. And with America readily embracing American Idol alums and even the original X Factor by way of Lewis, while ignoring America's Got Talent, what use is yet another talent show? Other than to produce an upstart to pester the charts with a couple middling Top 20 singles before hightailing it to the jungle to apply lipliner with a matchstick á la Janice Dickinson? Any attempt to create to Americanize this will smell vaguely of facsimile.

Even The WB's short-lived Pop Stars lives on as an Idol knock-off, despite it actually predating Idol. And we all saw how far Pop Stars got us.

(This far, in case you forgot.)