Belatedly:
Nip/tuck is over. It included incest, auto-castration, sex with a couch, pica, sepsis from a tampon, human taxidermy, and Joan Rivers. It was the best of television, it was the worst of television, with head-blowing simultaneity.
Not everyone knows Nip/tuck was founded on negative energy. Ryan Murphy consulted a plastic surgeon and didn’t enjoy himself. No surprise that Murphy then annihilated that experience-he’s an ex-journalist with a fastidious tolerance for kitsch and found objects and information missed by the cursory. So Nip/tuck became the most visible vector for its creator’s neuroses of any show on modern television.
Another secret, more conjectural: Murphy’s a true auteur, every bit as much as Ball and the Davids (Chase, Milch & Simon) all of whom got more credit for making TV the gorgeous educated guess it now is.
One of the greatest ironies is that Murphy ostensibly considers television a sort of pox: going out of his way to insult every popular show during his run; making fun of us for watching his own, even. Nip/tuck was extremely good at moral stereopsis, which word I swear I didn’t just use to prove I read The New Yorker.
But while I’m at it, Anthony Lane (and I guess, y’know, scientists) defined stereopsis as ‘the process by which our binocular vision yields a sensation of depth, with each eye giving a slightly different account of the same object.’ This piece is not apologia for Nip/tuck being 3-D television. But, for instance, it’s a reason Murphy reiterating Christian Troy as the worst person who ever lived never got old, or unironic. Christian Troy isn’t/wasn’t even close to the worst person who ever lived; I know at least six dudes just like him.
On the same note: early Nip/tuck was never more than an extremely well-written soap—infidelity, cheek swabs, a hit & run. Once it moved in a more unmitigatedly gonzo direction it actually got realer-you could almost see Murphy frantically clipping articles from OK! behind a cairn of dirty dishes.
Impromptu, at the end of season four he moved McNamara/Troy from Miami to LA—less juice, more pulp. What followed was a terrifying dialectic on Hollywood, deflected off Brecht to DePalma. Critics ignored it but Murphy was on to something. He’d sent his show there to die.
Even when it tipped beyond mordant (this season) and Murphy edged away physically and creatively, Nip/tuck stayed up in your face. It also acquired a deathful certainty; Sean got cynical about plastic surgery and you knew the jig was up. Caulking butts just wasn’t in his future.
At the very end everything got all solipsistic, not that the show wasn’t that. The disappearance altogether of Christian’s son Wilbur and the jaunty way everyone moved on from Kimber’s suicide wasn’t negligent writing. No, people on this show straight-up forgot people and why waste an episode on Kimber’s funeral? Sean and Christian both would have George Bushed it.
