BREAKING NEWS
The Dirt on Cox's New Project
Former Friends star returns to television
LOS ANGELES - After 10 seasons as Monica Geller, the nerdy neatnik on the hit series Friends, Courteney Cox could have walked into the offices of any television network in Hollywood and had executives open their wallets for the right to feature her in a new series.

So why, for Dirt, her first television project in nearly three years, did Cox choose the FX cable channel? It is no coincidence that the new show centers on the deception and misery that underlie the world of tabloid journalism. The idea came from Cox's own experience with the paparazzi. In their pursuit of photographs documenting her pregnancy, Cox said, "The paparazzi were incredibly annoying."

After one particularly unpleasant encounter with a photographer in which, Cox said, "I just lost it," Thea Mann, an executive at Coquette, suggested creating a show about tabloid photographers. "The idea was to do a show about a guy who would be willing to do anything," Cox said, "the lowest of the low of paparazzo, the one that is in your garbage and just would do anything for the shot."

"We wanted to explicitly start developing these female antiheroes," said John Landgraf, the president of FX. "It just seemed like an editor was a much larger center of power and a place from where you could generate many more stories. And the tabloid world is really a place that's dominated by powerful female editors."

Lucy Spiller, the tabloid editor played by Cox, is certainly more complex than Monica Geller. Cox plays Lucy as dark and distant as Pluto. Cox describes Lucy as "someone who you felt for but also who you loved to hate." Her overriding characteristic, she added, "is that she always tells the truth, no matter what. What she might do to get the truth may not be great in a lot of people's eyes, but she won't print it unless it's the truth."

Which, as Landgraf explains, causes Lucy Spiller "to leave this massive trail of destruction in her wake, because she has no nuanced sense of the truth as being anything other than absolute good."

"Maybe someone has a right to privacy," he continued. "Maybe there are certain truths that, while they benefit her and her magazine, are so massively destructive to the people around them that there might be an ethical or moral value in not publishing them. So she's an antihero."
The New York Times