Investigative reporting, sort of

With “Smoking Gun TV: Year-End Special,” Court TV gets a little more on-screen mileage out of the popular and influential website it has owned since 2000. It is at once a kind of ad for the website -- your one-stop URL for leaked memos, mug shots, affidavits, backstage riders, autopsy reports and declassified FBI documents -- and a leavening agent for the network, injecting a little bit of hip humor into its usual docket of murder, rape and reruns of “NYPD Blue.”

And “a little bit” would be the operative words here. This is the sort of mildly amusing, inconsequential fluff that you could well afford to miss, but which, should you opt in, will probably keep you watching until the end.

“Like most Americans, I’ve often wondered ‘Who are the Smoking Gun?’ ” begins host Mo Rocca, familiar from Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” whose mock-journalistic format “Smoking Gun TV” appropriates. (That question is never quite answered.) In essence, the Smoking Gun is the National Enquirer for the self-styled self-aware, its tone ironic and knowing instead of shocked and scandalized.

The website, like the special that honors it, is almost completely without real weight or political content, concentrating rather on the lawsuits, drunk driving arrests, divorce proceedings and autopsy reports that constitute the life of the modern media star, along with such authentic “scoops” as the internal memo from the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services that found no substance in current charges against Michael Jackson.

In the website’s cluttered Manhattan office, Rocca visits the site’s staff -- editors William Bastone and Danny Green, reporters Joseph Jesselli and Andrew Goldberg -- and they seem like affable and interesting people, though the pace of the show and the nervousness of the camerawork doesn’t allow you to focus on any of them for long. Rocca and “correspondents” -- that is, stand-up comics -- Jessica St. Clair and Christian Finnegan also go on location, as it were, for stories on bridal rage, the “Girls Gone Wild” lawsuits (which inspires an amusing sketch involving release forms and sobriety tests) and the failure of Britney Spears’ restaurant, NYLA.

Like Court TV in general, “The Smoking Gun” is based on the proposition that flamboyant expressions of human frailty are the stuff of entertainment, and more so when they involve famous people. Its “Top 5 Celebrity Stories of 2003” include Courtney Love’s drug arrests, the Paris Hilton sex video, Liza Minnelli’s alleged spousal abuse of David Gest, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Oui interview and Catherine Zeta-Jones’ habitual litigiousness. (I will not say which wins the first “Smokey” award; I will leave you that much suspense.) While this all accurately reflects the concerns and mocking tone of www.the smokinggun.com, what doesn’t translate is the very thing that makes the website actually fascinating -- the documentary evidence itself, unmediated by euphemism, analysis or comedians.

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‘Smoking Gun TV: Year-End Special’

Where: Court TV

When: Tonight, 8:30-9

Host...Mo Rocca

Executive producers Jerry Kupfer and Robert F. Katz