Year: 2007

Okay. Enough’s enough. I don’t care if I find out whether these guys manage to rob Mick Jagger or not. Without Mick Jagger, the show’s dull. It’s predictable. There’s clearly something there, but it’s really struggling to make itself known among the general cobblers. It comes to something when the title sequence is the funniest gag in an entire comedy.

It’s not awful. It’s not painful (check out Salon’s “bad sitcom pain-rating scale”, which rivals The Carusometer for usefulness). But it’s definitely something you really don’t care enough about to watch more than the occasional episode of at most. It’s visual popcorn that makes you titter. It’s cheese string for the mind.

Oh well.

The Medium is Not Enough has declared The Knights of Prosperity to be a three or “Minor Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Minor Caruso corresponds to “a show in which David Caruso might guest star. He will demand more on-screen time than the actual star and that he defuse at least one bomb using his expert marksmanship, even if it’s a romantic comedy”.

Episode five of Dirt has aired and I feel a little cheated. The chief of FX promised that we should all keep watching until episode five, because then it was going to get good and funny. Now, I’m not sure if he meant that it gets good and funny after episode five or not, but it certainly wasn’t good and funny during.

We started off on a low, got lower for episode two – a full five on the Carusometer – before episode three returned us to our previous low high. Episode four had some moments of dark humour that were actually quite enjoyable, thanks to our schizophrenic reporter (that man who I initially thought “looks a lot like Ian Hart” turns out to be Ian Hart, thus exposing the secret Brit all US shows must now have). But he re-embraced the darkness, despite being armed with kittens given birth to him by his pregnant dead hallucination of a girlfriend, so that humour’s disappeared again.

Indeed, the supposedly funny episode five was more of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so I’m not sure we’ve turned humour corner onto hilarity drive here. What we have, instead, is a show that is clearly Courtney Cox’s attempt to get back at the tabloids by doing unto them what they’ve done to her. It’s all made up. All of it. Not a word of it rings true, which is surely the point. But it’s just so dark and vengeance-ridden that it’s just not good television – not because it should be light and frothy, but because it’s ultimately empty, ridiculous and unentertaining.

So I’m afraid, Dirt, that The Medium is Not Enough has declared you to be a four or “Major Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Major Caruso on The Carusometer corresponds to a show in which David Caruso not only stars, but has full editorial control over the scripts, all of which call for other actors to be buried up to their knees while being forced to agree that Jade really was a good film, that they really haven’t seen a taller actor than him in their lives and that tangerine is probably the manliest of all hair colours.