TV Eye: More fluff than claws

After years of working on the sitcom Friends, its stars have struggled to maintain much of a profile, with the inexplicable exception of bland Jennifer Aniston. What a shame, then, that Courteney Cox, the sharpest of the three Friends females, has chosen to return to television in such a banal show as Cougar Town after her saucy tabloid-bitch turn on the Dirt series.

Last night's debut of Cougar Town on TV2 - made by the production company Cox runs with husband David Arquette - felt phony from start to finish. Cox, playing 40-year-old divorcee Jules Cobb, examined her svelte body in the mirror and declared it was crap. As if. The evidence in the mirror said otherwise.

The gist of the flimsy plot is that this mother of 18-year-old Travis feels old (at 40!) and lonely. She wants to start dating but she's unable to find any men she likes of her own age because they're into younger women. It's all a cliche.

Her goofy, grating, real estate cohort Laurie talks her into thinking about becoming a cougar, going for younger men - hardly a novel practice. They trotted off for a prowl in a club, Jules went stupid on two cocktails she drank with a baby-faced boy, then fled when she realised how undignified she was looking. Unfortunately for the viewers, she wasn't doing anything particularly interesting at all. He followed her home, they did you-know-what and, at the end of last night's episode, he was back for more. None of it felt remotely real.

Cox never spoke when she could screech, there was shoving, chasing, billboards of Jules all over town and an ex-husband so juvenile he could be cougar prey himself. Cougar Town is lame, not so much a comedy as a piece of silly fluff.

There's something amiss about the latest Underbelly series as well. Last week's double-episode debut staged the scene, that the cops running King's Cross from the late 80s to 1999 were bent as coathangers and in cahoots with a bunch of drug-dealing drongos. This we know anyway.

But lord, it dragged on, with the usual line-up of mumbling crooks, flashes of violence, cash-loaded cops, booze, drugs, hookers and annoying music. Just a normal night at the Cross.

Last night's programme centred on country-girl-turned-hooker Kim (Keem) who's bored with the trappings of filthy lucre, including a charge account at David Jones, and yearning to do something better with her life, like joining the cops. Her father was a police officer and she has something a psychiatrist would call a cop-daddy complex. Strange girl.

Trev the bent cop kept arriving home paralytic, Keem's little sister joined her on the game and young Lebanese guy Johnny got shot in the guts. Last week he got stabbed in the guts. It didn't seem to bother him much.

His mentor, chain-smoking asthmatic George Freeman, finally went to the big ashtray in the sky and so the rivalry for succession is on. All this palaver, supposedly about terrible, corrupt, real events, was presented in an almost desultory way, lazily acted and lacking tension, hardly an accusation you could hurl at the first two Underbelly series.

If you want to see a fantastically scary dramatisation of events just before this period of Sydney's dodgy policing history, seek out the Blue Murder series on DVD. It will make your hair stand on end.