Nip/Tuck or Nip YUCK?

by Jennifer Squires Biller

There is pushing the envelope and then there’s Nip/Tuck.

If you’ve been reading Tube Talk the past few months, you know I’ve been singing the praises of Nip/Tuck again, after it got off track a couple seasons ago with that whole demented Carver storyline. The show moved to Los Angeles and seemed to get back to what attracted viewers in the first place: the complex characters we love.

That was until Tuesday’s episode.

That episode pushed the squeamish bar so far that at times it was unwatchable. If a mutilated corpse, graphic surgeries, a cannibalism story, a disturbing murder admission to a child, and hammertoes weren’t enough to send your hand covering your eyes, then the scene where a man was killed, as he was stuffed like a teddy bear, surely would have.

The episode was so over-the-top disturbing that I thought for a moment I was watching the Nip/Tuck of two years ago.

My biggest complaint with the show through the years is that Sean and Christian never seem to get involved with “normal” people. Almost every woman introduced in the past three years has been a complete wacko. Are there no normal people in Miami or L.A. who don’t have sex obsessions, stalker personalities, or murder on the mind? Come on.

Nip/Tuck is at its best when it gets back to the basics: the characters we love - Sean, Julia, Christian and Liz - not the over-the-top crazies that seem to continuously come and go through the revolving door. The real story of Nip/Tuck is between Sean and Christian and how they can ever get past the fact that Christian fell for his best friend’s wife. (At least I thought he had.) It seems now that the woman Christian has coveted for the past 20 years is now just like any other to him, disposable.

I don’t get it. And I don’t get why the show suddenly is going back down this ridiculous dark road of psychopaths. We all know where it leads. Before long, Sean and Christian will be headed to the swamp with a trunk full of hams.