KEY POINTS:
In Dirt (Monday, 10.30pm, TV2) Friends' Courteney Cox plays Lucy Spiller, a tabloid magazine editor who has no friends, only sources, and enemies and those who suck up in pursuit of the puff piece.
We know she's hated from the opening scenes when a Hollywood player at a
party warns her against taking a sip from the drink she left on the table before doing the rounds.
Doing the rounds means doing a sweep of the room, watching a supposedly hetero actor eye up another man's bum. Watching a very thin actress stuffing her face with canapes.
All while mentally mocking up a cover for Drrt, one of the two rags Spiller "edits". So hetero guy's headline will read: "I'm Gay!" Skinny actress is: "Celebulimia!"
In a story conference, a "journalist" responds to the only believable line in last night's first episode - "Okay, what have you got?" - with the hold-the-presses news that they have some "really ugly celebrity butt shots".
Spiller: "Do we have Britney?"
They do. What about the headline? Derriere Don'ts? Booty Boo Boos? Pass the Cottage Cheese? Spiller likes that last one. "That's good but it's little abstract. This is DIRT." The headline will be: Dis-Ass-Ter!
This is what passes for humour on Dirt. What passes for dirt is very dirty indeed, in that boring, grinding way that passes for most telly sex scenes. There's plenty of it and none of it is remotely sexy.
Perhaps that's the laboured point. Spiller's mags make money spilling the dirty secrets of the stars, all of which are captured by the long lens of resident paparazzo, Den, a schizophrenic who watches his words turn into worms and slither away. He sees rain fall from the sky and become drops of blood. He has a cat, his only friend (although it looks as though the editor with a heart made of an antique stone press might have what passes for a soft spot for him). The cat has cancer; it talks to him. In English. This is supposed to be a bit surreal; a bit edgy, I suppose. It just comes across as silly.
Cox is, of course, a Hollywood player herself, as is her husband David Arquette who is executive producer of the series. So it is also supposed to be a bit ironic.
When Spiller takes that sip of her unattended drink she says, "You know, I'm not afraid", despite the warning that she's in a roomful of people who would dearly love to return the favour and poison her. "Because you and all your other Hollywood pals read my magazines. And as much as you hate to admit it, you need me."
It is revenge, then, but with a knowing nod to celebrity culture. As in: We might be celebs but we're not stupid, you know. We know, you know we know that those paparazzi shots we complain about are sometimes quite handy for those times our careers are fading. But that doesn't work with Cox playing the tabloid editor; casting her as a parody of the vain, vacuous, publicity-seeking celebrity might have - although Ricky Gervais has already been there, got celebrity actors to do that with Extras.
And if she's going to play shallow but calculating bitch can't she play just that? Last night she met a guy who was reading a book. A book! Heavens. The whole book happens, he says, "because a guy dips a cookie in some tea".
"It's not just any cookie, it's a madeleine," says Spiller.
"She's gorgeous and she's read Proust," says the guy, just in case we didn't get it. A cookie? That might be what they call a madeleine in Hollywood. I think they'd call that exchange, and this show, a stinker, anywhere.
