FX's 'Dirt' still needs to dig deeper
THE MONITOR
What was missing in Season 1 carries over to Season 2: the key to a core relationship and taking a stab at the tabs.
THE first season of "Dirt" fell short for many reasons but none so glaring as the relationship between the show's principals, editor of the tabloid Dirt Now Lucy Spiller (Courteney Cox) and her go-to paparazzo, Don Konkey (Ian Hart). She's an icy beauty, rigorous and vindictive; he's a schizophrenic who dresses like an extra from a James Dean movie and talks to his cat, who talks back. Apart from chatter about the old days on the school paper, the highly codependent friendship went largely unexplained and unproblematized.
As a corrective, last week's second-season premiere seemed determined to close the gap. At the outset, Don staged a frantic vigil at Lucy's bedside -- at the end of last season, she'd been stabbed by an actress she helped push from the A-list to rehab. "I'm really worried about her," Don explains. "I'm all she has left." At the end of the episode, Lucy joined Don on a trip to the grave of his dead cat.
But even these glimmers of warmth -- and given the glaring incongruity of their friendship, they're barely that -- do little to illuminate what frankly remains inexplicable. And thus a hollowness remains at the center of "Dirt" (FX, 10 p.m. Sundays), despite a passel of tweaks to the show's structure, some of them effective.
The innovation of the second season is to rip tawdry story lines directly from the headlines of real-life tabloids -- last week's premiere featured an Anna Nicole-alike and a Britney-alike, and tonight's episode features story lines about a Paris Hilton clone (named Milan Carlton -- seriously) and a troubled sitcom star who combines the foibles of Alec Baldwin and David Hasselhoff. (They should get writing credits, given how close the script hews to their indiscretions.)
A faster, darker feel
THUS far, this season's episodes have been quicker, more taut and more sinister. But there has been little change to the show's central conceit, which is ostensibly to comment on tabloid culture. So assiduously does the show avoid passing judgment on its characters, however, that they could almost be working at Better Homes and Gardens -- even when Lucy was stabbed last season, it was hard to feel either sympathy or schadenfreude. Her character is that ambiguous.
