Before he made shows like Scream Queens, American Horror Story, and Glee, Ryan Murphy made Nip/Tuck. His sophomore series, which ran on FX for seven years, established Murphy as one of the small screen’s most distinctive voices, using a unique blend of dark humor, graphic medical procedures, and over-the-top storylines.
The series begins its run in Miami, where college buddies-turned-medical partners Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) run one of the city’s most elite plastic surgery practices. Like a hipper, and far more stomach-churning, version of House, the series sees the doctors perform your standard vanity procedures—boob jobs, liposuction, facelifts—but also paints them as innovators in their field, largely due to Sean’s medical expertise. Christian, on the other hand, is in this business for the women; when he’s not in surgery, he’s often out trolling the city’s nightlife scene for new patients. Meanwhile, Sean is a dutiful family man: husband to his college sweetheart, Julia (Joely Richardson), and father to his children Matt (John Hensley) and Annie (Kelsey Batelaan). Though it quickly becomes apparent that no one’s life is as perfect as it seems.
In addition to being an immediate hit when it premiered in 2003, Nip/Tuck was also immediately controversial. The series touches on a number of taboo subjects that would still be considered a bit controversial today—including, on more than one occasion, pedophilia and incest—but at its heart, the series is about accepting people, including ourselves, with all of our flaws. Which makes it sound a lot more touchy-feely than it really is. Over the course of six seasons, viewers faced an onslaught of bizarre storylines that included brushes with drug-dealing, organ-harvesting, porn-making, Scientology, and an unhinged wannabe talent agent who kills a rival with a teddy bear-making machine.
You may find yourself rolling your eyes at the ridiculousness of it all, yet you’ll stay tuned in just to see what the show’s creators will think of next—and to be comforted by the fact that the show is absolutely reveling in its own vapidity. Now that Murphy rules the small screen, it's time to binge-watch the show that established him as one of the most unique voices on television—and invited viewers to look below the surface at what makes us all human. Even if it’s not always pretty. (Spoiler: It’s usually not pretty.)
Number of Seasons: 6 (100 episodes)
Time Requirements: Seven weeks. Like plastic surgery itself, Nip/Tuck is a show that best achieves the desired effect when doled out in small increments over time. Tackling two episodes per night will have you done in less than two months.
Where to Get Your Fix: Amazon, iTunes
Best Character to Follow: While the less hedonistic viewer may more immediately associate with Sean McNamara, Christian Troy is undoubtedly the most fun character to watch—even if that means the occasional run-in with a well-organized ring of organ thieves. (Yes, the show really did go there in Season 4.) Even if you’ve never been to a swingers’ party, bedded a mom and her daughter at the same time, or been engaged to a porn star, Christian’s constant struggle to be a better person, despite his tendency to always make the worst possible decisions, is oddly relatable.
Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:
Like facelifts, not every season of Nip/Tuck is perfectly executed. But amidst the sometimes messy results, there are moments—and even full hours—of creative brilliance that make watching the series in its entirety worth the time and effort. Case in point: Season 4, which sees the arrival of Burt and Michelle Landau (Larry Hagman and Sanaa Lathan), who buy into the McNamara/Troy business, only to see Michelle be blackmailed by her former pimp/lover, James (Jacqueline Bisset), into turning the office into a den of organ thievery. It’s a storyline and set of characters that are neatly disposed of and forgotten about once the season is over. Yet the same season features great episodes with Peter Dinklage as Marlowe Sawyer, manny to the McNamara’s newborn son, Conor.
That said, there are some clunker episodes throughout the series, including:
Season 3: Episode 6, "Frankenlaura" McNamara/Troy is hurting for business in the wake of Christian being arrested as a possible serial killer. Desperate for cash, the doctors agree to reassemble the bodies of several corpses that have been mutilated to create one female body for necrophilic—and, it turns out, incestuous—purposes.
Season 4: Episode 2, "Blue Mondae" Christian attempts to turn his new patient, a young gay man whose lover is paying to make him look more distinguished, straight. To do it, he takes him to a strip club where he barters a lap dance in exchange for a breast reduction.
Season 4: Episode 9, "Liz Cruz" Liz Cruz (Roma Maffia), McNamara/Troy's trusty anesthesiologist and longtime conscience, is still recovering from a kidney transplant—damn those organ thieving prostitutes!—when she books a bit of liposuction with the doctors to impress her new girlfriend, Poppy (Alanis Morissette), who clearly sees much more room for physical improvement.
Season 4: Episode 11, "Conor McNamara, 2026" There are two things that are hard for even the most innovative of shows to pull off well: dream sequences and flash-forwards. This episode attempts the latter—and shows the audience where the characters would be a decade from today, to pretty much non-memorable effect.
Season 5: Episode 6, "Damien Sands" Like "Conor McNamara, 2026," this episode mostly steps outside the normal continuity of Nip/Tuck and plays out in the form of "Plastic Fantastic," a new reality show that Christian has convinced Sean to film. It is as gimmicky as it sounds.
Season 6: Episode 5, "Abigail Sullivan" While Sean, Annie, and Conor nearly escape the good doctor’s quickie marriage to serial killing anesthesiologist Teddy (played by Katee Sackhoff in Season 5, then Rose McGowan in Season 6), poor Matt has resorted to becoming a... mime who robs convenience stores? (We can’t make this stuff up, people.)
Season 6: Episode 17, "Christian Troy II" Toward the very end of the series, Nip/Tuck proved—once again—that changing the narrative landscape of the series was rarely a good idea. In this case, it’s an anesthesia-induced fever dream courtesy of Christian, who spends the bulk of the episode coming to terms with his past misdeeds.
Seasons/Episodes You Can’t Skip:
Season 1: Episode 1, "Pilot" Like any great pilot, *Nip/Tuck'*s debut episode acts as a kind of litmus test for the series that follows: It establishes the key players at McNamara/Troy and the people who populate their world, both loved ones and patients. If you’re not turned off or grossed out in the first 10 minutes, keep watching.
Season 1: Episode 8, "Cara Fitzgerald" Part of what helps Nip/Tuck stand up, even to this day, is the strength of its ensemble cast who, when not dealing with the fallout from the behaviors of Sean and/or Christian, have their own demons with which to contend—and Matt McNamara gets the brunt of it all. By the end of the first season, his girlfriend (Kate Mara) admits that she’s in love with her best friend (Sophia Bush), and he and a friend end up running over and nearly killing a classmate, Cara Fitzgerald (Keri Lynn Pratt). Though he's too afraid to admit his culpability, Matt manages to convince his dad to operate on the now-disfigured girl, whose overly religious mother refuses medication to help her out of her coma and on with life. Poor Matt. At least he got a threesome out of that girlfriend debacle.
Season 1: Episode 10, "Adelle Coffin" Sean, ever the dutiful husband and father, has been a bad boy. He’s fallen in love with a former patient, Megan (Julie Warner), who has just learned that she is dying of cancer. In a case of bad timing, Sean and Christian are readying for their recertification tests, but Sean’s mind is elsewhere.
Season 1: Episode 13, "Escobar Gallardo" Miami gangster Escobar Gallardo (Robert LaSardo) knows a secret about Sean and Christian, and manages to blackmail them into performing a number of breast surgeries on the mules bringing his drugs into the country (that's not an implant—that's heroin). In order to gain back control of their lives and business, Sean attempts to channel his own inner bad guy.
Season 2: Episode 7, "Naomi Gaines" Midway through Season 2, we got our first hint of what is probably *Nip/Tuck'*s most memorable storyline: The Carver, a creepy, mask-wearing serial killer who believes that "Beauty is a curse on the world," and attacks the beautiful people of Miami to prove that point. Sean, who is always looking for a new challenge, offers to operate on The Carver's latest victim. The episode also concludes a great two-episode story arc with Jill Clayburgh as Bobbi Broderick, a lonely woman unhappy in life and with the results of her liposuction.
Season 2: Episode 8, "Agatha Ripp" Today, Ryan Murphy and Sarah Paulson are one of television’s most dynamic creative duos. It all began in *Nip/Tuck'*s second season, when Paulson played Agatha Ripp, a prostitute who might just be the second coming of Jesus.
Season 2: Episode 9, "Rose and Raven Rosenberg" When a devastating truth comes to light, Sean and Christian’s longtime friendship and partnership comes crumbling down. They have just one surgery left: They’re part of a world-class team of doctors convening in New York to separate conjoined twins. The patients become a metaphor for the doctors themselves who, despite their dysfunction, can’t seem to live without one another. A threesome that begins as a sort of last hurrah ends up as a rebirth of their continued partnership.
Season 2: Episode 16, "Joan Rivers" Given the circumstances surrounding Joan Rivers’ unexpected death in 2014, this second season episode—in which the legendary comedienne decides to undo all of her previous operations as her next act—achieves unexpected depths about the world of plastic surgery.
Season 3: Episode 14, "Cherry Peck" Season 3's penultimate episode sees the revelation that Kimber Henry (Kelly Carlson) didn’t jilt Christian after all—she is being held by The Carver. Meanwhile, Cherry Peck (William Belli), a trans woman Matt fooled around with then beat to a pulp, shows up at Sean’s office demanding he fix her face. Also in this episode: a eunuch.
Season 3: Episode 15, "Quentin Costa" The Season 3 finale is one of those odd television episodes that manages to be both compelling and disappointing. It's one of the series’ most-watched episodes, in which the true identity of The Carver is revealed. But it falters in the moments that follow that conclusion.
Season 4: Episode 8, "Conor McNamara" It isn't until the show's fourth season that we realize: Besides his history with Christian and Julia, we don’t know much about Sean McNamara. How he came to be the striving perfectionist that he is comes to light in this flashback-filled episode.
Season 5: Episode 1, "Carly Summers" Shifts in geography can often signal the beginning of the end for some series, but *Nip/Tuck'*s move from Miami to Los Angeles in Season 5 was a stroke of creative genius that allowed the former big fish to have to pay their dues all over again in the City of Angels, where a mention in Us Weekly holds more weight than a co-authored article in the New England Journal of Medicine. It also allowed for a stream of new characters to pop up in the fifth season, including small screen heartthrob Aidan Stone (Bradley Cooper), closeted television producer Freddy Prune (Oliver Platt), and talent agent/stuffed animal enthusiast Colleen Rose (Sharon Gless).
Season 5: Episode 19, "Manny Skerritt" In a sea of ridiculous surgeries, the episode in which a yogi wants a penis reduction because he can't stop fellating himself may be the silliest of them all. But because the episode embraces that fact, and largely because of Bradley Cooper’s storyline in the episode, it works as one of the series' most fun installments.
Season 6: Episode 16, "Dr. Griffin" As their often tumultuous relationship continues its roller coaster ride toward the end of the series, Sean and Christian sit down for a bit of couples therapy. The episode allows a kind of narrative that the series’ setup didn’t always make room for, and ends up being one of its rawest hours.
Why You Should Binge:
It’s a rare television series that can be both utterly disturbing and hysterically funny, often at the same time, and yet still reveal dark truths about the human condition. While the storylines may seem utterly preposterous, Ryan Murphy swore that the show’s medical cases were "100 percent based on fact." It’s also worth noting that the series actually spawned a sub-genre of reality television: Plastic surgery reality shows like Dr. 90210 and Botched have Nip/Tuck to thank for their existence.
Best Scene—"The Perfect 10":
We’re not sure which is more degrading: Waking up to an empty bedside after a one-night stand with a well-to-do plastic surgeon, or having the guy stick around and point out all of our physical flaws with a tube of bright red lipstick (one of Christian’s favorite moves and sales tactics):
The Takeaway:
Nobody’s perfect—despite what one's exterior looks like.
If You Like Nip/Tuck, You’ll Love:
There’s a very specific cadence to Ryan Murphy's work that makes it easy to discern. For those who relish his over-the-top gore and bevy of pop culture references, Scream Queens offers both in bulk, with plenty of '80s and '90s nostalgia.
Though its humor is decidedly more subtle, and its tone much darker, Nip/Tuck could in some ways be considered the much more gregarious cousin to Six Feet Under, Alan Ball’s unrelenting—and masterful—character drama surrounding a family-run funeral home.
