‘Dirt’ still needs to dig deeper

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.

Though Lucy is achingly beautiful and supremely self-possessed -- in 10 years of “Friends,” Cox never looked this good -- she’s a loveless and unsympathetic figure, more stimulated by her job than by any man; she often responds to scoops with clumsy bursts of sexual innuendo, and though she’s been depicted in various forms of congress, she was most visibly aroused last week, when she chased a starlet in her new Audi, pulling in front of her so Don could lean out the window and snap a few shots.

Occasionally, Lucy embarks on an anti-celebrity tirade -- when Carlton (Elisabeth Harnois) is arrested, she muses, “Where are the Rodney King cops when you need them?” -- that telegraphs almost as insincerely as her jeremiads about journalistic ethics.

Those around her, though, don’t question her authority much. The first season of “Dirt” sagged under the weight of a hastily drawn, and limp, supporting cast. Celeb couple Holt McLaren (Josh Stewart) and Julia Mallory (Laura Allen), who ended up stabbing Lucy before being killed herself as she fled the scene, never radiated heat; the former, who struck up a semi-passionate affair with Lucy, often mistook sullen and slurry for brooding. Dirt Now underling Willa McPherson (Alexandra Breckenridge) was meant to be conniving, but never felt like a real threat.

In last season’s most invigorating episode, Vincent Gallo played a former child star, Sammy Winter, who takes the Dirt Now magazine office hostage. Long abandoned by the media, Winter realized he had to do something dramatic to reinsert himself into the spotlight. After successfully forcing Lucy to put him on the cover of Dirt Now, and murdering her assistant along the way, he surrendered to police, satisfied.

Winter was electric. And more important, he had a point of view on tabloidism: It is a necessary evil. If only there were more such spines on call. There is token dissent this season in the form of Farber Kauffman (Ryan Eggold), a Columbia journalism school grad who tries to snag a hospital bedside interview with Lucy for the LA Weekly. “Tabloid culture killed Julia Mallory,” he says, beaming, “but not before she tried to kill the tabloid queen.”

Farber, of course, must be undone, and so Lucy hires him on the spot, both a means of proving that real journalistic skills have value in her world, and to show that anyone’s ethics can be had for a price. Tonight, in his chunky black glasses, Farber is enjoying what he doesn’t yet realize are his final days as a naif. Lucy takes $100 from him on a bet about whether Carlton will be freed from jail before spending the night there. From their facial expressions, though, it’s more like she took his virginity -- her, bemused with herself, him, wondering if that’s what all the hubbub was about.