As curses go, the one besetting the alumni of “Friends” is not nearly as toxic as the legendary curse of “Seinfeld.”
But that’s not to say they’ve escaped unscathed. Jennifer Aniston has had a lively if often lackluster movie career. Matthew Perry’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” is struggling. Matt LeBlanc moved on to “Joey.” Enough said. Lisa Kudrow’s “Comeback” didn’t. David Schwimmer will always have “Madagascar.”
That brings us to “Dirt,” the new vehicle for Courteney Cox debuting at 11 tonight on FX.
This show about the editor of two tabloid magazines demonstrates that being part of a blockbuster sitcom ensemble – even one where the cast members were getting a million dollars per episode – does not make you a TV genius.
It could be that you had the good fortune of ending up on a show with the right premise at the right time and were blessed with gifted comic writers.
Here, unfortunately, we have a muddled mess that does offer a few life lessons – TV style:
Don’t have your husband (David Arquette) as the executive producer. He is likely to indulge your desire to look glamorous, if vacuous.
Decide what you want to make. A drama perhaps, or a parody or a soap opera. Please, pick one.
Allow other characters to have some depth.
The story, of course, revolves around Cox as Lucy Spiller, the editor of Drrt and Now magazines. The tabs seem roughly to correspond to Us Weekly and People, though who can tell these days when every mag on a grocery store rack claims to have the dish on how is Jen coping and where Britney left her panties.
As is typical with this sort of star vehicle, Spiller appears pretty much to single-handedly do all the work on both magazines. She sniffs out the scoops and even coddles her schizophrenic paparazzo.
Did we mention how glamorous she looks?
The mentally ill photographer Don Koney (Ian Hart) is hands down the show’s most interesting character. He’s brilliant at getting the sort of shocking photos you see on magazine covers. In the first episode, he catches a pro basketball player and family man having sex in a hot tub with a woman who is not his wife. In fact, she’s a stripper the photog paid to set him up.
In the second episode, he gets a photo that proves a young star – think Britney and K-Fed – actually had a surrogate carry her baby and only pretended to be pregnant. All the while, Don’s meds are not working very well; he starts hallucinating while shooting a dead starlet at the crematorium just before she is incinerated.
While there is no real plot reason for Don to be mentally ill, Hart brings complexity to the character and evokes some compassion from the audience. If only that could be said for the rest of the cast.
Cox is left with dialogue that makes you wonder if anyone did newsroom research before launching the show. When she reveals to her staff a plan to run photos of the dead actress about to be cremated on the magazine cover, she is greeted with groans.
“Is this too hard-core for you Columbia J-School grads?” she says. “This isn’t Tiger Beat.”
No, apparently it’s a remedial TV script-writing class.
“Dirt” is a surprise coming from FX, which has been one of the cable channels creating some of the best and edgiest original programming, including “Rescue Me,” “The Shield,” and “Nip/Tuck.”
In a recently published interview, Cox and Arquette said their interest in creating the show came, at least in part, from their own pursuit by the tabs.
That attitude might have inspired a line of dialogue toward the end of the second episode when Spiller pitches a new approach to the magazines’ owner, Gibson Horne (Timothy Bottoms), with a grandiosity that pushes into the realm of the absurd: “We have the chance to shape American culture,” she says. “This is what the marketplace wants.”
It seems unlikely this is what viewers wants from FX. An inside look at the sleazy world of tabloids turns out to be as ham-handed and crude as the world it intends to expose.
Staff writer Edward P. Smith can be reached at 303-954-1767 or emsith@denverpost.com.
