Dirt
Season 2
Starring Courteney Cox Arquette, Ian Hart, Laura Allen, Josh Stewart
FX Network
Sundays, 10pm EST
Premiere date: March 2, 2008

“Even network news is recycling the story. So much for covering the bombings in Iraq.”

We all kind of have a secret love affair with tabloid press. We perch ourselves on one side or the other of the unspoken moral argument, but however you look at it, we’re all guilty. We’ve all read the stories or seen the headlines. I wouldn’t say most of us knowingly seek them out, but it’s almost impossible to avoid. Why would we? As sad a commentary as it is to say aloud, it’s free entertainment. Equally sad is the fact that it’s not entirely our fault. We really have nowhere to hide and we really have no choice. Over the past decade, tabloid press has risen from the seedy underbelly of journalism to the mainstream. You can barely pull up the front page of a news website, read the paper, or turn on the national news without the barrage of “˜now what happened?’ information being regurgitated onto us about the latest celebrity train wreck flavor of the week. As sensational as it is and as much as part of us wants to see them turn it all around, we keep reading out of sheer morbid curiosity. Anyway, that’s just what constitutes “˜news’.

Come to think of it, in today’s culture of the internet and needing to know information almost before it even happens, it kind of shocks me that a show like Dirt hasn’t made its way to TV before now.

Dirt focuses on the publication Dirt Now, a fictional glossy tabloid magazine run by editor in chief Lucy Spiller (Courteney Cox Arquette). She is all business and is an admitted workaholic who has no time for stories of the mundane. Lucy is interested only in breaking the latest new story and has almost no remorse for the people she interacts with so long as there is a story to be told. She has no conjunction about ruining the lives of celebrities who do not cooperate with her. Lucy’s partner in crime is Don Konkey (Ian Hart), her long-time friend and mildly schizophrenic paparazzi who stops at nothing to get his assigned story.

As last season ended, Lucy’s secret relationship with actor Hold McLaren (Josh Stewart) had been exposed to Holt’s actress girlfriend, Julia Malloy (Laura Allen). Hopped up on painkillers and on a career downward spiral, Julia correctly targets Lucy as the main catalyst for her recent misfortunes, attacking her in her home, stabbing her repeatedly and leaving Lucy for dead. Laying there dying but always on the job, Lucy calls Don to come and take photos of her laying on the ground bloodied and wounded to ensure that her magizine will have the exclusive for the story on the attempt on her life.

And you thought your job was tough.

Season 2 picks up shortly after the events that ended last season. Lucy is in the hospital. She wakes from her coma only to be angered that the people left in charge of her magazine in the wake of her attemtped murder have not produced a story congruant with her high standards. Armed with her storied ruthlessness, she shortly returns to work hellbent on cleaning up the mess, moving on, and committed to exposing even more secrets for the pages of her tabloid.

With the introduction of new reporter Farber Kauffman (Ryan Eggold), Willa McPherson (Alexandra Breckenridge) is no longer the rookie at Dirt Now. She spent all last season learning that checking your conscience at the door and embracing the Lucy’s cunning is paramount to becoming successful in the business. This is a lesson that Farber learns quickly as he questions Lucy’s instinct early on.

The celebrities in the show are molded directly from those of the headline stories I talked about earlier. While no specific celebrity is named directly, the references are thinly veiled. We know they are referring to Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, Alec Baldwin, and David Hasselhoff when we see them because, well, we’ve seen the real stories a hundred times on TV.

Lucy learned first hand that there is a price to pay for the success of the trade she has chosen. While she hasn’t lost her venom, she has been humanized a bit by her experience. The show does a great job of balancing the tabloid stories while still driving the overall scope of the show by not overdoing the production or allowing the subplots to become too muddled or heavy handed.

Dirt perfectly navigates the intricacies of the relationship between celebrity and the media. So perfectly in fact that it asks the question: Who needs who more? Dirt feeds our voyeuristic appetite for celebrity news, but from a slightly different angle. We can all read the stories and make whatever “oh, poor so and so” commentary we like but at the end of the day, even if in passing, we still watch the shows and we still read the stories. Stepping back, it makes you wonder – are we accomplices and an equal part of the problem? Surely not. I mean after all, hey, we’re just watching the news, right?

And there’s the rub.

Season 2 of Dirt premieres Sunday, March 2 at 10pm EST on the FX Network.