Previewing Dirt

Warning: mild spoilers ahead for the new season of Dirt which premieres this Sunday at 10:00 on FX.

Whenever I stand in the grocery checkout line and glance over to see a headline to the effect of, “Jamie Lynn Spears tells boyfriend he’s not her baby daddy” I always feel a little dirty. Which would make Dirt the perfect title for a show about a tabloid magazine. The show was created by Courteney Cox and David Arquette and follows Cox as DirtNow’s editor in chief and dealing in rumors and innuendos didn’t help her character as she was stabbed by one of her biggest target of the first season in the finale who subsequently was hit by a car after fleeing the scene.

Despite the nausea inducing concept of following the lowest of the low on the human evolutionary scale, the show has a quick wit and more than a few interesting characters most notably the lead paparazzo that carries on conversations with his cat. The new season also sees a new reporter that Dirt fleeces from a more respectable newspaper who has to unlearn what he studied in journalism school to get ahead in his new job and Willa (Alex Breckenridge) has no problem showing him the ropes.

Naturally the cliffhanger of Cox is resolved quickly (surprise, she’s alive) and she is back to work to find that somehow she has been scooped on her own stabbing by the other tabloids and is out to find a new story. The first she finds is story about a pregnant former stripper who inherited a substantial sum from her much older billionaire husband. Mmm, where have I hear this before?

Other stories under consideration are a starlet who is caught chasing after he former assistant’s mom, again strangely familiar. Then there is the sitcom star, as played by Tom Arnold who knows a thing or two about tabloids, who has a answering machine message calling his daughter names leaked to the internet (it’s like déjà vu…) followed by a YouTube phenomenon where he is drunk on the kitchen eating a pasta bowl (…all over again).

Then there is the famous for being famous heiress Milan Carlton, played by the chick from Point Pleasant, who drunkenly drives on the off ramp prompting some jail time. An heiress with no redeemable talent and a city in Europe first name and a hotel for the last who spent time jail; why does that sound familiar? This is going to bug me for a while until I can figure that out. But I do not remember the real life story ending as hilariously.

You can try to figure it out for yourself when the second season premiere of Dirt airs this Sunday at 10:00 on FX. You can also check out Dirt on iTunes or Amazon Unbox.