Dirt
The Complete First Season
Starring Courteney Cox, Ian Hart
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Available Dec. 11, 2007

If you’ve never seen an episode of the FX Network series Dirt, chances are the only thing you know about the show is that it stars Courteney Cox, of Friends fame, and for some reason she’s wearing a lengthy red dress against the backdrop of a major city in all the show’s promo materials.

But take a closer look at that promo shot and you’ll notice that there are people being suffocated beneath the train of that flowing blood-red dress. And the city … that’s Hollywood.

Cox, in her first post-Friends role, stars as Lucy Spiller, editor in chef of two Hollywood tabloid magazines, Dirt and Now. Lucy dishes “the dirt” about every celebrity in town, going far beyond just sending out the paparazzo blood hounds to capture big-name actors, musicians, and athletics with their pants down. Lucy can’t leave anything up to chance, so she also manipulates events to create the news. Take, for instance, the time she hired a hooker to solicit a married basketball star, then had her trusty photographer Don (Ian Hart) secretly take pictures of them in the act.

It’s not enough for Lucy to report on celebrities cheating on their spouses, but she also captures them doing drugs, having homosexual rendezvous, and faking pregnancies. And if she doesn’t run the story right away, it’s because she’s after something bigger … cue blackmail. But in her twisted mind, Lucy thinks that her magazines are not about rumor and gossip, but rather about the truth and she proud of all she’s accomplished. On the outside, she’s a strong, powerful, confident vixen, but when she’s home alone — she has no love interests — we see another side to Lucy, one that’s vulnerable, frigid, and unsure of herself.

It’s safe to say that Lucy Spiller is a far cry from Cox’s Friends persona Monica Gellar and it’s interesting that Cox not only chose Lucy as her first post-Friends role, but she also serves as co-producer of Dirt along with her husband David Arquette. Perhaps it’s an effort to break loose from her former good-girl stereotyping or maybe it’s because Cox and Arquette have spent so much time as tabloid fodder that they can bring a different perspective to the show.

Aside from the main focus of Lucy, the series also brings us into the lives of some of the people caught in Lucy’s web, like the supercouple known as “Blogan” — actor Holt McLaren and his rising star actress girlfriend Julia Mallory, who’s outshining him at every turn. All the usual lies and deceptions are in place with this couple, who apparently do little else but lay in bed, have sex, and smoke pot in an out-of-work slothy kind of way. Who knew celebrities were so damn boring? I guess that’s why, once again, Lucy has to make interesting.

The series also follows the life of Don Konkey, Lucy’s functional schizophrenic freelance photographer. This character is a strange twist, because typically, we are made to believe that the paparazzi are low-lives who feed off the misfortunes of celebrities who invade people’s privacy and sometimes even cause physical harm to their subjects just to get their money shot. But while Don does do immoral things to get a story, he only does so because he’s being manipulated by Lucy — the only person he can trust. He’s mentally ill and at times, his illness gets the better of him, but underneath, it’s obviously he’s really a good person.

On the other end of the spectrum is the initially innocent Willa McPherson, a young reporter working for Lucy. With each day, Willa becomes more corrupted in her quest to finally make it big as a reporter. She’ll do anything for her big break, whether it’s sleeping her way up or posing as a celebrity’s wife in order to get a supercouple’s nanny to give her insider information.

Normally, I wouldn’t have thought to watch this show, but I accidentally caught the first episode when it first aired eariler this year and I was immediately hooked. I didn’t roll my eyes at one episode and that’s saying something considering the premise of the show — and the fact that I can’t stand celebrity gossip crap and sitting through just one episode of TMZ makes me want to rip my hair out.

What’s entertaining about Dirt is that it neither trashes the paparazzi nor glorifies the Hollywood star, and the storylines are based in truth. While every character in the show is a severely flawed train wreck waiting to happen, this series is miles above other nighttime soap operas. The episodes are well written and plotlines are not obvious, which is refreshing. And I don’t think there was one bitch-slap in the entire first season.

This 4-disc DVD set contains all 13-episodes of the first season and includes a nice amount of bonus features. “Celebrity Couple Gets Dirty” contains interviews with producers Courteney Cox and David Arquette. The couple talks about what drew them to wanting to do the show; Arquette talks about how the paparazzi was hounding them while Cox was pregnant with their child Coco. “Through A Lens, Darkly” explores the character of Don Konkey, who’s play by Ian Hart, who is from Livepool and affects an American accent for the show.

There’s “Tabloid Wars: Totally True Stories from the Celebrity Trenches” and a very short Gag Reel, but the best feature by far are the “Deleted Scenes.” Each scene is introduced by Matthew Carnahan, who’s an executive producer, writer, and director for the show, explaining the scene and why it was cut.

There’s also a sneak preview of Season 2, which is scheduled to begin airing on January 1, 2008.