“You should be happy,” he adds sarcastically. “ I don’t want your pity,” Sean snarls when Christian tries to console him over his baby news.

The show looks sultry and cool and the music is wittily chosen, but the dialogue sometimes lurches into the kind of language heard in Port Charles or Pine Valley. “Nip/Tuck” too often turns into “General Hospital” with liposuction instead of life support, and breast implants in lieu of amnesia and evil twins. But what on one hand sounds like an elegant metaphor also sounds very much like a description of any daytime soap opera. The last line of the theme song fastens on the lyric “a perfect lie,” and that is what “Nip/Tuck” is nominally about: the deceptions, physical, psychological and emotional, that fill out people’s lives along with their wrinkles. He may require prenatal surgery, but so does the show: an ironoplasty. “Nip/Tuck” has always strained on paradox, and now the plastic surgeon’s baby is going to be born deformed. Shields’s, though she has told the world that Tom Cruise apologized to her in person.) There is even an unborn baby with a rare genetic malformation. The new season is crammed with a whole new set of lurid plot lines, including lesbian blackmail, a sex-starved nanny and a sudden and alarming conversion to Scientology. And yet, among other things, in the second season, Sean discovered that the son he thought was his was actually Christian’s. One would think any show that packs in everything from breast reduction (a lap dancer seeking respect) to vocal cord lifts and testicle implants would find sufficient dramatic fodder under the knife to leave home life alone. Turner explains that she is a phone sex hostess who wants her larynx tightened so she will stop alienating clients with a voice that resembles, as she puts it, a “geriatric bullfrog.” And when the partners utter their ritual opening line to clients - “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself” - Ms. Shields is Christian’s therapist, a psychologist with issues of her own. Hagman plays a billionaire with prostate cancer who wants testicle implants (“kiwi” is the size he has in mind) to reclaim his manhood and his young bride. The fourth season is trying to restore the show’s balance of farce and melodrama.įrom left, Julian McMahon and Dylan Walsh in Nip/Tuck. Credit. The third season tried to outdo the first and second, and exhausted itself. But “Nip/Tuck” started up where most other shows leave off: willfully absurd and over the top. Most shows reach a point where they sag and suddenly strain in outrageous directions it has happened on “Boston Legal,” “Desperate Housewives” and many others. Christian rises to greet two sexy, men-trawling women (a mother-daughter team, as it happens) and beamingly announces, “We’re doctors.”Įverything imaginable has happened, and nothing has changed. So there is relief, delight and disappointment in seeing Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) once again at the bar of a swank Miami nightclub. The two boyhood friends who share a plastic surgery practice in the South Beach section of Miami have endured all kinds of baroque twists - infidelity, abducted girlfriends, illegitimate children and a maniacal slasher - but their personalities remain fixed, unmarked and buoyant. No matter how far and distortedly the characters are stretched, they always return to their original form. Soap operas and “Nip/Tuck” are like Silly Putty, or, for that matter, the cosmetic filler Restylane. “Nip/Tuck” begins its fourth season exactly where this FX drama began, with gruesome surgery belied by jaunty pop music: in this case his-and-hers face lifts to the 70’s disco tune “Boogie Oogie Oogie.”

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