Courteney Cox is eager to shed her good girl “Friends” image.

“Dirt,” the new FX series she stars in which premieres tonight, goes a long way to meeting that goal. Lucy Spiller, the character Cox plays, is tougher, meaner and smarter than Monica, the “friend” the actress portrayed on the hit NBC comedy for nine years.

“Dirt” is billed as a series that “exposes the truth behind the facade of show business image-making.”

The series goes behind the scenes to show how magazines similar to Us and People, along with tabloids like the National Enquirer, form uneasy alliances with agents, public relations flacks and the stars themselves to give the public glimpses of the private lives of movies stars, sports figures and the infamous.

The characters that people “Dirt,” from the editor Cox plays to the celebrities splashed across the covers of the show’s publications, are too shallow and superficial to entice viewers to watch for more than one episode, let alone more than one season.

Cox plays Lucy Spiller, the editor of two weekly publications that dish the dirt on celebrities. She is powerful, demanding and ruthless. Cox’s portrayal is so cold that at the end of the day the only one the editor has to curl up with is her magazine, still warm from the presses. And that is all Lucy deserves.

The one character worth watching is Don Konkey, the schizophrenic freelance photographer she can always count on to get “the shot.” The photographer, who still shoots with film and refuses to go digital, met and bonded with Lucy in college. He can’t survive without her. In addition to allowing him to make a living, she makes sure he clings to reality.

Ian Holm is hypnotic in the role of a man who will lie, bribe and break the law to snap pictures of celebrities in compromising positions. The English actor’s portrayal of Don’s fragile hold on his sanity is the one and only reason to tune in to “Dirt” more than once.

Cox and her husband, David Arquette, are the executive producers for the series, so its quality rests squarely on the couple’s shoulders. “Dirt” is not a bad show by network standards, it’s just not up to the exceedingly high FX standards set by “The Shield,” “Nip/Tuck” and “Rescue Me,” which air in the same time slot.

Reruns of any of those shows would be better than “Dirt,” which just can’t live up to its time slot.