DVD Review: Nip/Tuck - The Complete Series

An early champion of basic cable programming, Nip/Tuck consistently pushed the TV envelope for six seasons on FX, drawing in viewers with salacious storylines, familial drama and lots and lots of sex.

Early on, it appeared as if the show had potential to be a darkly comic satire of the plastic surgery industry and the culture of physical perfectionism that surrounds it, but it became clear pretty quickly that wasn’t Nip/Tuck’s strong suit. Rather, the show transformed (or descended, depending on your perspective) into a fever-pitched soap opera, with tensions always pushed to the max and characters always capable of sinking into more depraved behavior.

The approach made for a show that is compellingly watchable despite the often utterly ridiculous plotlines that ensure nearly every major character wrongs and/or sleeps with every other major character. But even though the show threatens to go off the rails often (and certainly does sometimes), the strength of the performances and series creator Ryan Murphy’s committed vision (something he’s been much less successful at finding with his latest series, Glee) make for a primetime soap to take seriously.

Dylan Walsh stars as Sean McNamara and Julian McMahon stars as Christian Troy, partners who own the Miami (and later in the series, Holywood) plastic surgery firm of McNamara/Troy. The two are old friends, but (at least initially) couldn’t be more different, with Sean being a committed family man with a wife, Julia (Joely Richardson), and two kids, Matt (John Hensley) and Annie (Kelsey Batelaan), while Christian is an unrepentant lothario, bedding scores of women (often his patients) on a regular basis.

The two begin every patient consultation by saying, “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself,” and the cases featured on the show almost never fall into the routine facelift or tummy tuck category — try breast implants for a man who wants to understand female sexuality better for a book he’s writing or a woman who wants her husband’s ashes used in her breast implants. Most episodes fixate on the particularly gruesome details of any given surgery, but the show still doesn’t aim to be a medical drama.

Rather, Nip/Tuck thrives on things going wrong, and although McNamara/Troy features incredibly talented plastic surgeons, the personal lives of both characters are a constant shambles, with any temporary joy replaced by nearly instant anguish — most of which the two bring on themselves with a never-ending parade of stupid choices. And yet, both leads make the characters compelling enough to care — Walsh with a high-strung neediness that belies his steady surgical hand and McMahon with a seemingly effortless veneer hiding a world of insecurities.

Article Author: Dusty Somers

Dusty Somers hails from Seattle, and is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma with a B.A. in journalism. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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