If you have so much as sneaked a glance at the cover of the "Star" or the "Enquirer", you probably really want to see DIRT, but would never dare admit it to your friends and/or neighbors. And though it's really too early to judge it from the pilot, DIRT is simply following the tradition of all those potboilers that came before it about the wickedness that pervades big, bad Hollyweird. Except since this is on FX and not the other networks, the sleaze can be just a tad sleazier than on other shows. And boy, do they take advantage of the opportunity! As co-Executive Producer and star of the show, Courteney Cox-Arquette wants to make sure that you smell the vengeance wafting off of this show. She "loves the smell of payback in the morning." And it kind of smells like...cherry lip-gloss...
Having been a friend of the friends who were on "Friends", as well as one herself, she knows what it feels like to have every move, every sneeze picked apart in public by the tabloid media, and she takes this time to "thank" them with a show that's about as subtle as a dozen eggs dropped off the top of Mount Fuji.
As Lucy Spiller (good, nuanced name, no?), the editor-in-chief of weekly trash wallows "DRRT!" and "NOW!" (so that the Star and People Magazine can't sue, I guess), she will stop at nothing to get the lowest of the lowdown stories on who's screwing and who's getting screwed in Tinseltown, both literally and figuratively. Of course, being a type-A go-getter, Lucy has no friends and more enemies than Alexis Carrington and Joan Crawford combined.
Well, maybe one friend: mentally unstable schizoid paparazzi Don Conkey (Ian Hart, brilliantly underplaying a role that could've been ridiculously over-the-top), who is kind of Lucy's lap-dog with a zoom lens...if she gets dirty at all the best parties and premieres, Don gets downright filthy (literally) as he catches the day's favorite marks in the act of...well, anything and everything. Drug use, unplanned pregnancies, kinky sexual infidelities, you name it, Don will shoot it and bring it back to you. Oh, and he'll also provide a little help making it happen.
A lot has been said about how there seems to be no redeeming characters on this show, but I think those people forgot what they were watching. This is SUPPOSED to be the kind of show where if you harbor any illusions about "making it big in Hollywood", it functions as a sledgehammer-driven morality tale that will allegedly make you think twice.
So have human beings REALLY sunk this low? Is this what passes for glamour, for beauty, for culture in the world these days? Well, if the way the tabloids at my local drug store sell out each week is any indication, I would have to say unfortunately - YES.
And that's also why I predict here and now, that DIRT may not last longer than a couple of seasons, but it knows that only the good, well-intentioned dramas about people-who-need-people are the ones that die young. So it should be sticking around for a while.
And what would I recommend it for? I'd say flawless camera-work and production design, great performances from Cox-Arquette, who attacks Lucy with venomous gusto, and Hart, who plays probably the only truly sympathetic character the show has, even though he does things that are at least as despicable as Lucy, if not moreso.
Let's see if they can get beyond the Lindsay Lohan/Paris Hilton/Jared Leto/Kobe Bryant stereotypes as the episodes progress, and give us something we haven't seen before.
Having been a friend of the friends who were on "Friends", as well as one herself, she knows what it feels like to have every move, every sneeze picked apart in public by the tabloid media, and she takes this time to "thank" them with a show that's about as subtle as a dozen eggs dropped off the top of Mount Fuji.
As Lucy Spiller (good, nuanced name, no?), the editor-in-chief of weekly trash wallows "DRRT!" and "NOW!" (so that the Star and People Magazine can't sue, I guess), she will stop at nothing to get the lowest of the lowdown stories on who's screwing and who's getting screwed in Tinseltown, both literally and figuratively. Of course, being a type-A go-getter, Lucy has no friends and more enemies than Alexis Carrington and Joan Crawford combined.
Well, maybe one friend: mentally unstable schizoid paparazzi Don Conkey (Ian Hart, brilliantly underplaying a role that could've been ridiculously over-the-top), who is kind of Lucy's lap-dog with a zoom lens...if she gets dirty at all the best parties and premieres, Don gets downright filthy (literally) as he catches the day's favorite marks in the act of...well, anything and everything. Drug use, unplanned pregnancies, kinky sexual infidelities, you name it, Don will shoot it and bring it back to you. Oh, and he'll also provide a little help making it happen.
A lot has been said about how there seems to be no redeeming characters on this show, but I think those people forgot what they were watching. This is SUPPOSED to be the kind of show where if you harbor any illusions about "making it big in Hollywood", it functions as a sledgehammer-driven morality tale that will allegedly make you think twice.
So have human beings REALLY sunk this low? Is this what passes for glamour, for beauty, for culture in the world these days? Well, if the way the tabloids at my local drug store sell out each week is any indication, I would have to say unfortunately - YES.
And that's also why I predict here and now, that DIRT may not last longer than a couple of seasons, but it knows that only the good, well-intentioned dramas about people-who-need-people are the ones that die young. So it should be sticking around for a while.
And what would I recommend it for? I'd say flawless camera-work and production design, great performances from Cox-Arquette, who attacks Lucy with venomous gusto, and Hart, who plays probably the only truly sympathetic character the show has, even though he does things that are at least as despicable as Lucy, if not moreso.
Let's see if they can get beyond the Lindsay Lohan/Paris Hilton/Jared Leto/Kobe Bryant stereotypes as the episodes progress, and give us something we haven't seen before.