Dirty "Dirt"

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS FRANK TALK ABOUT "ADULT" TOYS AND HOW THEY INTERACT WITH COURTENEY COX AND RICK FOX. A GREAT DEAL OF PARENTAL INDISCRETION WILL BE NEEDED TO PLOW THROUGH THIS ONE.

On “Dirt,� FX’s latest provocation and easily the most sexually explicit show ever to air on basic cable (the gauntlet has been thrown, HBO; time to step up your game), Courteney Cox stars as Lucy Spiller, an ice-queen editor of celebrity-gossip tabloids who, frankly, doesn’t have a lot of use for men and their cloying emotions when she has a less needy interactive device in the drawer of her bedside table.

Former Laker Rick Fox plays a basketball superstar who is shown undulating in a hot tub with a topless stripper; after a bit of that, they scramble out of the water, the stripper tells him, “Now it’s your turn,� and he assumes the position. We don’t see the device the stripper straps on, but we do see the vivid results via a string of images taken by a tabloid photographer.

And of course, since the show is concerned with the hedonistic misadventures of young Hollywood, that’s just the beginning. Matthew Carnahan, creator of “Dirt,� says if you find the first few episodes explicit, you haven’t seen anything yet.

“They’ve really let us, as a table full of writers, we’ve gotten to write our collective id, and that’s frightening, but it’s incredible,� Carnahan says.

“It’s amazing what you can do on FX – we’ve created this kind of a morbid world, then we show what happens in it,� Cox says. “On ‘Friends,’ the dialogue was pretty mamby-pamby compared on what we do on this show. If FX actually says no to something we want to do, then chances are we probably shouldn’t do it.�

So, you have conversations with FX, and they’ll say, “You can show the vibrator, but the strap-on is right out?�

“That’s exactly the conversation we had,� Cox laughs.

Carnahan clarifies: “The strap-on story was, we could suggest the whole idea but we couldn’t show anything that would be representational of a phallus. So we ended up with some poor T-rex toy that we had to chop off the arms. Somehow, that passed muster.�

So Rick Fox is pleasured by a toy dinosaur, huh? His mother must be so proud.

Carnahan drolly replies, �All of our mothers are proud.�

- "Dirt:" 10 p.m. Tuesdays, FX.