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Not So StellarWhat Star Jones doesn't get about women, TV, and women who watch TV.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2007, at 6:59 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

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Last week also saw a painful segment with Dustin Diamond, the aforementioned "Screech," of Saved by the Bell "fame." Jones interrogated Diamond about the sex videos he himself released when he found he couldn't suppress them. (Cut to truly harrowing footage of a bearded Screech in a bubble bath.) Jones shouted down his (somewhat provocative) claim that the legal system makes it almost impossible to suppress such tapes. Instead, she hectored him about his efforts to revive his dwindling career with a tawdry stunt.

Um. Star? The most interesting thing about Star's show is Star, who has shed 150 pounds since The View. Indeed, while she was busy excoriating Screech for cashing in on his sex video, she declined to note that while she refused to discuss her gastric surgery for ages, she then gave the exclusive story to Glamour. Then again, she does look smashing. Maybe the producers think that's enough to win women viewers.

Which brings us to the really insulting aspect of Star Jones: the notion that what women want from their television programming is to watch a bunch of other women free-associate all at the same time. This appears to be the mode of the revamped View, as well, and who knows, perhaps women really do aspire to television that looks like a Lean Cuisine commercial, with packs of women huddled around a countertop scarfing pie and talking over one another. But the effect of listening to Star and her girlfriends talking over one another eventually has all the charm of listening to seven women all talking on their respective cell phones at the manicurist.

All this interrupting might be slightly more palatable if it were the byproduct of some real, hard-nosed legal or political debate. But Jones is constantly at pains to make her show's gossiping and moralizing friendly to women. This seems to require intermittent reminders that the world is actually a pretty nice place. In the first moments of the first episode, Star tells us that the show seeks to create a "safe environment to share stories" but where there is no fear of asking "the tough questions." Tough but safe. Like a manicure.

Take, for instance, the wincingly named "SHE party," a recurring segment where SHE stands for "Simply Her Experience." The SHE party conversation, like all the others, is free-range, drifting from one guest's disclosure that she knew there were no WMD in Iraq long before we attacked, to a general colloquy on what one looks for in a girlfriend ("honesty and loyalty," all can agree). But whenever her guests begin to excoriate the bad athletes or bad celebrities, Jones stops to remind us that there are "lots of athletes out there doing their jobs" and lots of "young actresses out there doing their thing."

Perhaps because she occasionally reminds us of the good people doing their jobs, Jones thinks of her show as being above the fray. She knew very definitely the kind of show she didn't want to do. As she told the AP: "I told them I don't want to do screaming TV, fighting TV, insulting TV."

What she wanted to do instead is less clear. The pervasive theme that carries through the first few episodes of Star Jones is lofty, moralistic clucking about the ugly effects of relentless media scrutiny on reality-show kids, athletes, starlets, actors, and Leona Helmsley. Jones herself has tried to have it both ways with the media, exploiting her fame while demanding her privacy, and now she's made a TV show that does the same thing. The hypocrisy of a program about celebrities that also derides television's obsession with celebrity seems to elude everyone who appears on the show. But maybe it's just the inevitable result of a collision between a notion of law that begins and ends in the bath with Screech, and a notion of women that begins and ends at a seventh-grade pajama party.