"Nip/Tuck" Returns, Revamped and Raring to Go

Published: January 1, 2008 at 08:02 AM GMT
Last Updated: March 13, 2008 at 08:02 AM GMT

By Ed Martin

FX's Nip/Tuck in the early episodes of its fifth season does something few long-running television series have been able to do: It successfully reinvents itself in a manner that feels wholly organic and right in line with everything that has come before. Whether or not the big makeover alienates the show's core audience remains to be seen when it returns next Tuesday, but I can't imagine any devoted viewer not being pleased with the changes at hand.

As compelling as Nip/Tuck has always been, this ongoing drama about two forty-something plastic surgeons in Miami began to feel played out last year -- this despite outrageous turns by a dazzling roster of guest stars including Larry Hagman, Jacqueline Bisset, Richard Chamberlain, Kathleen Turner, Mario Lopez and many others. Just when it appeared that the show had nowhere to go but down, series creator Ryan Murphy did something rather remarkable. In the final sequence of season four, the characters simply burst into song (The Submarines' Brighter Discontent) as they became aware that their lives were stagnating and they needed to move on to something new. The first step: Move to Los Angeles, the throbbing nerve center of this country's new millennial obsession with cosmetic surgery and celebrity superficiality.

The promise of sweeping narrative changes was enough to give anyone pause, but the first episode of the revamped Nip/Tuck should calm any fears. Although it is largely a new show it feels comfortably familiar. Seriously, I cannot think of another established series in television history that was so thoroughly reworked by its creators and yet maintained its narrative identity and its core character connections with such conviction. (The West Wing went through tremendous creative changes in its final season, but President Josiah Bartlet was still in the White House.)

The canvas may be different, but nothing about the essential spirit of the show has changed. Nip/Tuck has always struck me as a psychological drama first, a dark comedy second and a minor medical show third, and that's still the case. Sex and sexual identity, marriage and divorce, parenthood and childhood, self-improvement and self-destruction and the perils of mid-life for men as well as women remain its primary themes.

Happily, Murphy and his team have kept all of Nip/Tuck's vital narrative characteristics firmly in place even while giving it total reconstructive surgery. Given the circumstances of the story in play, it is utterly believable that all of its characters would pull up stakes and relocate. (Who hasn't wanted to start a new life at one time or another, and who wouldn't welcome the opportunity to do so with one's immediate support system in tow?) As seen at the very end of season four (amid all that singing), Doctors Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) have left Miami for Los Angeles under the wrongheaded assumption that superstar plastic surgeons from Florida will standout in surgery-saturated Southern California. Their outspoken and lonely anesthesiologist Liz Cruz (Roma Maffia) has made the move with them. While they aren't seen on camera in episodes one or two of the new season, it won't be long until the docs are joined by Matt (John Hensley), the young man they both refer to as "their" son, and his wife Kimber (Kelly Carlson), the porno star-turned-Scientologist who counts both Sean and Christian among her former lovers. Even Sean's ex-wife Julia (Joely Richardson), who moved to New York City last season with Sean's two youngest children, turns up in L.A. She drops a bombshell that would seem startling on any other prime time drama but is right in line with the tone of this show.

There are a host of new characters this season that feel fully developed right from the start. They include pompous ass Aidan Stone (Bradley Cooper), the lead actor on a television drama for which Sean and Christian become medical advisors (and on which Sean becomes a popular television star); Fiona McNeil (Lauren Hutton), a power publicist who takes Sean and Christian on as clients; Olivia Lord (Portia De Rossi), the controlling new love interest of one of the primary characters; Kate Tinsley (Paula Marshall), Aidan's beautiful but insecure co-star; Freddy Prune (Oliver Platt), the neurotic producer of Aidan's series; and Mistress Dark Pain (Tia Carrere), whose name is entertainingly self-explanatory. Waiting in the wings: The return of Powerball Lottery winner Dawn Budge (Rosie O'Donnell) and the arrival of adult film magnate Ram Peters (John Schneider, late of Smallville).

Despite the wholesale changes in their lives, Sean and Christian are still the same flawed geniuses we have known all along. Sean actually fares better than Christian in L.A., at least at the start, perhaps because he isn't trying as hard to shine in the blinding light of faux-stardom. He begins a successful new career while boosting the McNamara/Troy plastic surgery practice and he meets a lovely new woman, too. Christian, he of the outsize ego, assumes that Los Angeles is his for the taking, but he is soon begging Sean to give him hair plugs and desperately posing nude for a skin magazine in order to boost his business and attract women (with quite the opposite result).

Most television dramas ultimately overstay their welcome. I likely would have put Nip/Tuck on that list this season were Sean, Christian and their loved ones still dealing with the same wild situations and lunatic circumstances in Miami. But their situations and circumstances seem much less outlandish in Los Angeles, perhaps because that city has cornered the market on crazy, and as a result the show is fresher and more fun. Sean and Christian were high profile surgeons coping with high drama and heightened reality in Miami, but now they are just two more faces in the crowd, surrounded by people who are more talented and more successful than they are, and way more shallow than Christian at his worst. Watching the guys navigate their new environs while discovering that Los Angeles may not be the best place to grow old should keep Nip/Tuck engrossing and entertaining all the way through season five, and longer if we're lucky.

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