In Cougar Town, Courtney Cox doesn’t speak. Oh, don’t get me wrong – she has lines. But she shouts them, whines them, screeches them, burbles them, blabs then, and just generally finds the most grating way of saying anything.
The story is about a newly-single mom in a town apparently laden with same, with a willing eye toward younger man, an embarrassible son, a libidinous younger friend (actually well played by Busy Phillips of Freaks & Geeks fame), and a sarcastic married friend (played by Christa Miller, playing basically the same character that she played on Scrubs, another series also created by her husband.) It feels like it wants to be audacious, but the pilot episode is merely grating, less “I can’t believe that they said that!” and more “why’d they bother?”
Elsewhere I read something that coincided with something a friend and I separately thought about this series: that Courtney Cox’s character must be the ultimate version of “Hollywood Ugly” ever seen on television. She looks fantastic (and their were at least two separate scenes of her in very skimpy underwear so we could see that for ourselves) and is professionally successful, but we’re supposed to believe that she is hard up for a date?