The British tabs are different. American tabloids, like the New York Post and the Daily News, can be rough and raw, God knows, and they like to get their teeth into a celeb story ("Come clean about Heath, Mary-Kate!"). But they are newspapers and have hard news skills that sometimes leave the broadsheets in the dust. Okay, there's the National Enquirer, but how often do you see normal-looking citizenry reading the Enquirer on the subway or a bus the way the Brits publicly devour the tabs?

British rags hardly pretend to be providing straightforward news. What they are doing is what used to be the job of popular fiction; namely, processing myth out of characters sucked in from real life. Right now the cast list includes such durable regulars as Kate Moss—with or without Pete Doherty—Princes Harry and Wills, Posh and Becks, and Kate and Gerry McCann, whose daughter Madeleine's kidnapping/disappearance in Portugal made them last year's headliners.

But a fresh year demands fresh blood, and January 5 showed real promise. The Daily Star had the nerve to run a story accusing the reality TV show Big Brother of condoning bullying. And the McCanns returned: "MADDIE'S MUM TO BE CHARGED." But the icing on the cake was certainly the front-pager "CRAZED BRITNEY TAKES BABIES HOSTAGE: Suicide watch on sectioned singer."

"Sectioned" means committed in UK-speak.

A couple days later, the headlines were to the effect that the McCanns were involved in negotiations over movie rights. Some were screams of outrage. Not the Sun. The McCanns pray that the movie will help find Maddie, the paper explained on January 9. Two days later the Sun's front-pager was "'MADDIE' FOR HIRE: Sick firm touts lookalike." The boss of the lookalike agency concerned defended herself, saying, "This isn't sinister, it's entertainment. And I take 20 percent."

The next day, the Daily Mirror led with "BRITNEY GOES ON THE RUN: She leaves U.S. to dodge clinic." The paper was scooped by its own Bizarre column with the news that a pink-wigged Britney was back in L.A. after a seven-hour jaunt to Mexico. The train wreck keeps thundering into the buffers with her off-the-wall antics, Bizarre chided.

Britney had gone to Mexico with her new beau, Adnan Ghalib, a Briton, and an actual working paparazzo. You might imagine that the tabs would applaud the fact that one of their toilers in the celeb mines had made bad. Not a bit of it. A moral tone asserted itself. "BESOTTED POP DIVA FLAUNTS WEDDING DRESS," revealed the News of the World. Outrageously, the "cunning pap rat" had "plotted 18 months to trap her."

On January 14 another Maddie lookalike surfaced. Also in the Sun. But in this case the story was "HELL OF LOOKALIKE'S MUM." "People point and whisper in the street," she told the paper. The Daily Mirror's front-pager was "BRIT: I'll commit suicide if they try to lock me up again." Within that same day was a newly blonde Amy Winehouse. The hugely talented, clearly tormented bluesy singer was shown being greeted by Kelly Osbourne and derided for her fashion sense. "You chavving a laugh, Amy?" demands the headline. (A "chav" is a vulgar young woman.) There's also a pic of Becks watching a football game. Just to keep Goldenballs in play.

Two days later the Sun's front-pager was a World Exclusive: "It would be better if I was dead. Britney's heartbreaking suicide note." She is shown wearing dark glasses and, understandably, a pout. On the 17th, the paper tried to cheer her up by publishing many heartwarming e-mails from their readers. One had written to the Sun to advise Britney to shun publicity. Smart thinking, surely.

Sunday Sport had been thinking smart, too. Its headline on January 20 was "BOOKIE TAKES BRIT SUICIDE BETS." A photograph of a betting slip gave two to one on overdose, five to one on jumping, seven to one on slit wrists, and eight to one on gunshot to head. There also ran rather an Enquirer-ish story: "FACE OF PROCLAIMER FOUND ON DOHERTY'S SPOT." The miraculous pimple was shown in color. And there was a magazine insert: "BARE AND NAKED CELEBRITIES." That same day, the News of the World ran a chilling front-page police sketch of "MADDIE'S KIDNAPPER: Beast who took McCann's little girl." It later emerged that he wasn't actually the perp. Oh well.

Doubtless the Screws apologized.

Then the next sideshow struck up. This one starred Amy Winehouse. On January 18, the tabs reported her "courtroom outburst," this being at the end of the hearing in which Blake Fielder-Civil, her husband of nine months, was being charged with conspiring to manipulate a witness in an assault case.

A "courtroom outburst"—but of course! These dramas, which are described monotonously often as "train wrecks," have in fact developed the episodic structure of the Greek tragedies to which they are sometimes much more accurately compared. And the courtroom outburst has become a reliable scene. Back in October, Britney had her own courtroom outburst, hollering, "Eat it! Lick it! Snort it!" during child custody proceedings. Powerful scenes, both. But neither compared with Heather Mills McCartney's version of the courtroom outburst, which had taken place in that most public of courts, a TV talk show.

On Monday, January 21, the Sun revealed that Britney had taken out a restraining order on the "rat snapper." It also ran a pic of her holding Back to Black, the CD by, yes, Amy Winehouse. Doubtless to comfort herself. And the paper wheeled out Lindsay Lohan from the obscurity of several days' neglect, running a photograph taken from the rear that showed her dress caught up in her underwear. It's always been pretty easy to get inside Lindsay Lohan's skirt, jested the caption-writer, but this is ridiculous.

The following day was a Sun special: "AMY ON CRACK," screamed the headline. The subhead was "Nosedive to oblivion." One of the texts began, "WILD AMY WINEHOUSE was filmed blitzed out of her skull and struggling to talk after sucking in crack fumes from a glass pipe."

Within was a feature called "What the experts think." One of the experts, a Sun columnist, wrote sternly that Amy Winehouse is a dead woman walking. Surely, as such a danger to herself, the time has come to have her sectioned under the Mental Health Act? Greek and Russian icons often depict a saint surrounded by small cartoony scenes from their martydom-bound lives. "Sectioning" has become another reliable scene in the tabloid equivalent. See B. Spears, above.

As, too, the police bust. Kate Moss, Pete, the other Kate and Gerry McCann, we haven't forgotten you! So, too, perhaps with Amy. "COPS SEIZE OUR AMY DRUG FILM," was the Sun's front-pager on January 23. As was inevitable, her next stop was rehab—she was taken in by Kelly Osbourne—another necessary scene in the downward plunge of the harried victims. If not necessarily the last.

The deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were vivid events that embedded them in the culture. Even the darker ones of Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain were not structured as voyeuristic, 24/7 episodic melodramas. The mainstream media nowadays also follow such stories, and the blogs are vicious, hard-hearted, and funny, but they do not have the mocking sanctimony of the British tabs, which create and inhabit this world as much as they report it. They are the judges, the juries, and the courtroom specialists; they are the shrinks; they mock, they abuse, they sympathize, and, ultimately, they provide the mourning crowds.