Courteney Cox has the stomach to handle nasty, gutwrenching gossip as 'Dirt's' scandal-mongering editor.
DIRT. Sunday night at 10. FX.
"Dirt," a drama designed to take a giant wink at the life of a hard-edged celebrity gossip magazine editor, has never really surmounted its central obstacle: How do you satirize a world that already satirizes itself every day?
What can you write into a fictional
Britney Spears character that the real-life Britney hasn't already topped?
Still, "Dirt" launches its second season Sunday night with full confidence that some percentage of TV viewers are as enthralled with the celebrity gossip industry as the people who work in it.
You just wish those viewers' loyalty could be rewarded with a more interesting show.
But alas,
Courteney Cox's self-described "crazy bitch" editor
Lucy Spiller, her eternally devoted photographer, Don Konkey (
Ian Hart), and an endless rotation of celebrity stand-ins make for a pretty shallow pool of dramatic interest.
To the extent "Dirt" serves as a star vehicle for Cox, she acquits herself well enough, though anyone who plays a snappish, nasty female boss these days needs to take a number.
Sunday's episode starts with the rapid resolution of last season's non-cliffhanger, when a celebrity whose life was ruined by Lucy's Dirt magazine marched into Lucy's office and stabbed her.
The only real consequence of this little encounter is that while Lucy was comatose, a rival gossip magazine dug out a better story about the stabbing than Lucy's staff at Dirt could pull together.
If this all sounds a little self-referential, you're catching on.
The pleasures of "Dirt" mostly lie in its subplots and small touches - like having Lucy, the big media player, find her only apparent refuge in the neurotic geek Don, who looks like
Ed Norton wearing
Matt Drudge's hat.
Less whimsical is the scene in which an aspiring investigative reporter makes it through security to Lucy's hospital bed, and she's so impressed she offers to triple his salary if he'll ditch the serious stuff and work for Dirt.
That turns out to be his price point, and he barely seems to notice when someone later jokingly calls him "Woodward," an allusion to
Bob Woodward, the Watergate journalist who apparently never got that good an offer from a gossip magazine.
As for stories, "Dirt" claims to rip them right out of the headlines, and Sunday's celebrities include a gold-digging woman who marries a rich man and a young female star with a squeaky-clean image and dirty real-life habits.
Lucy handles it all with a mixture of cynicism and cynicism, plus serene confidence that where there's a secret, there's always someone to spill it.
When she's in the hospital for stitches, the nurse whispers some really good stuff about a celebrity patient on another floor.
Lucy slips her a few bills, and so goes another glamorous, exciting day in the world of celebrity gossip. The system works.
