Courteney Cox must have been sad when Dirt was cancelled – her one chance to feel up a string of younger men for cash, gone.

So Courteney Cox must be thanking her lucky stars that she’s just signed up to star in a new ABC sitcom by the creator of Scrubs called Cougar Town, where she’ll get to play a woman in her forties who basically has it off with a string of younger men a lot.

Look, we know what you’re thinking – first Dirt, then Cougar Town. Courteney Cox is a really big fan of these salaciously-named TV shows, isn’t she? That’s good news for us, because the last three scripts we’ve written have been entitled Giant Slag, Tits! and Sluttybum McHussyknickers. We’re going to be rich, we tell you. Rich!

Former Friends stars basically have three career options – 1) they can make talky pseudo comedy shows that take themselves far too seriously, 2) they can make hopeless new sitcoms that die a quick death, or 3) they can enter the world of less than mediocre movies.

Courteney Cox already did the first one when she made Dirt, and she’s dabbled with the third by doing one of the voices in Barnyard – so that just leaves number two. And never let it be said that Courteney Cox isn’t a fan of number two.

Even though Dirt was incredibly accurate – it was just like working here, right down to the mentally-ill nutter in the hat who follows us around and our constant use of vibrators – it hasn’t been picked up for a third season, and that’s why Courteney Cox has leapt to ABC, where she’s signed up for Cougar Town, a sitcom by Bill Lawrence, the creator of Scrubs. The LA Times reports:

“Forty-year-old women on TV are so beautiful and perfect and wrinkle-free,” Lawrence told the Hollywood Reporter. “People don’t do the reality of it, and there is a real comedy area about a woman who is talking about Botox, about having sex with the lights on and how her body is changing.”

We have to say that Cougar Town sounds like quite an exciting show, not least because Bill Lawrence’s involvement guarantees that every episode will be a zany, fun-packed laughorama right up the final five minute, at which point someone will die, the lead character will narrate a self-helpy voiceover monologue and some drippy music – probably performed by sodding Keane – will play in the background.

But we’ve still got that to look forward to. For the time being, Courtney Cox has to get in training for Cougar Town. What resources could she possibly tap to learn the internal workings of a neurotic older woman with an unnatural tendency to sleep with boys young enough to be her son? Who knows…