Tuesday, May 8, 2012

A Strangely Lukewarm Review of Nip/Tuck - The Complete First Season


The Good: Good acting, Interesting characters, Serialization, Some DVD Extras
The Bad: No commentaries, Some very predictable plots, Familiar feel
The Basics: While nowhere near as shocking or special as it initially appears to be, the first season of Nip/Tuck is filled with interesting characters and good performances.


Nip/Tuck was one of those series' that I was doing my best to avoid until the show ended and a massive "Complete Series" boxed set was released. This is a good quarter for that, with The X-Files, Angel, and Gilmore Girls (among others) all coming out with boxed set DVDs of the entire series. But I've been working a lot lately with some monotonous tasks that allow me to work in front of a television and as a result, I've been running low on material to watch and I decided it was time to pick up the first season of Nip/Tuck on DVD and give it a spin. Until now, my only experience with the show was catching it occasionally while on my business trips and enjoying it.

Wow am I glad I watched it now and did not wait until the complete series was released on DVD!

Nip/Tuck follows the day-to-day trials and tribulations and monotonies of the partners at McNamara/Troy, a prestigious and successful Miami plastic surgery firm. Run by Sean McNamara, a timid, efficient and seemingly emotionless man who has partnered with Christian Troy, a man whose libido is roughly that of a horny teenager, who has been riding his coattails for years. Troy's ethical blindspots and sexual blunders often jeopardize McNamara/Troy as well as the lives of the partners.

While Troy sends the business into a tailspin by taking money from a man who has stolen $300,000 from the Colombian mob, Sean finds his home life unraveling. Unloved by his wife, Sean is forced to explore the way he has been an unloving husband when he begins to fall for both the firm's new psychological profiler and one of the patients. But the dramas surrounding those at McNamara/Troy do not end with the workers; Sean's son finds himself getting involved with a lesbian cheerleader and Julia McNamara finds herself struggling with temptation and the potential consequences of her prior indiscretions.

Nip/Tuck is not all it is cracked up to be. Sadly, for a show that is touted as groundbreaking - no more so than by those executive producers and writers who appear in the bonus featurettes to share behind-the-scenes information about the first season - it seems terribly familiar. And there is a reason for that; viewers have seen it before. Nip/Tuck, with its casual drug use, dysfunctional family, disinterested treatment of the human body and prevalence of indifferent sex is a simple recasting of Six Feet Under (reviewed here!). While Six Feet Under followed the dysfunctional Fisher family through the life at a funeral home, Nip/Tuck employs virtually all of the same devices in the world of cosmetic surgery. While the first seasons of Six Feet Under had an adversary in Matt Gelardi and Krohner, Nip/Tuck utilizes a competing plastic surgeon named Dr. Bobolit.

My point is, for anyone who has been watching what is considered fresh and new the last few years, Nip/Tuck seems more derivative of the best of those than an actual trendsetter. Like the best dramas, this show is serialized, so the actions have consequences and events in the pilot episode become explosive near the end of the first season, though there are certainly enough threads left hanging to lead the interested viewer into the second season.

The problem is, it's not different enough. Sure, it's about plastic surgery - or more honestly, plastic surgeons - but it is essentially a drama about a family falling apart. Sean McNamara is in the middle of his mid-life crisis, having hit forty, achieved most of what he wanted to, and discovering himself loveless and miserable. This is a concept that has been done to death in films and on television and sadly, Nip/Tuck does not add anything truly distinctive to the Zeitgeist. At best, it mimics the best of them.

And while those who know me might be surprised to see me write this, honestly; how many programs involving disintegrating relationships are we supposed to flock to? I'm all for the realistic portrayal of human relationships in all of their complexities (Nip/Tuck is not that) and I've no problem with watching miserable people struggle to try to get their lives in order, but at some point, the sheer number of programs where everyone is miserable and trapped within their own little hells becomes oppressive. At the very least, it's not entertaining. Nip/Tuck may be escapism, but only for sadists who want to watch people suffering.

This is not to say that the show is entirely unenjoyable. The episodes often have fun moments where there is titillation, flirtation, or outright sex and nudity (yea cable programming!). Seriously, this is an adult program and it's intended for an audience that is mature, even if the characters do not comport themselves like emotionally well-adjusted adults. No, Troy's sexual escapades and sexual immaturity is likened to that of a teenager, which makes the role of Matt McNamara, Sean's son (though it is heavily intimated in the pilot and throughout the first season that he is actually Christian and Julia's), a sober and often unrealistic foil. Matt has more maturity than most of the characters and there is something unsettling about him that reads wrong for a character surrounded by so many people making such bad decisions.

On the whole, though, it is the characters of Nip/Tuck, that make the show worth watching. In season one, the principle characters include:

Sean McNamara - A sober, family man who is in the throes of a midlife crisis. Unloved by his wife Julia, he finds himself disconnected from her, his son Matt and his daughter. He devotes most of his time and attention to his work, which he is a master of, and soon finds himself falling for one of his clients, a cancer survivor whose husband leaves her because of her inability to conceive following her chemotherapy. Closer to Christian than anyone else in the world, he finds himself often lost without anyone he is truly able to connect with,

Christian Troy - An oversexed egomaniac, Troy manipulates women using their insecurities about their body and his abilities as a plastic surgeon. He shows callous disregard for his own well-being and often that of Sean, Julia and everyone else in his life. He makes an attempt to be a one-woman man, with pretty disastrous results,

Dr. Grace Santiago - A psychological profiler, she is hired to screen patients for mental illness to make sure their surgeries are more necessary than an attempt at therapy. Santiago finds herself involved with Troy and undervalued in the office,

Matt McNamara - Just discovering sex, the sixteen year-old begins to model off Christian, who he likens to an uncle. Matt's life becomes complicated when his first love interest turns out to be a lesbian and finds herself interested in another girl, who she wants Matt to satisfy for her,

and Julia McNamara - Sean's wife and formerly involved with Christian, she's working hard to hold the family together and find some measure of happiness. Failing that, she goes back to school where she finds herself palling around with an attractive swinger and working to better herself. She often seems to be the loneliest of the bunch.

The season also features memorable recurring characters like:

Dr. Liz Cruz - The anesthesiologist at McNamara/Troy,

Sophia - A transgendered woman played brilliantly by Jonathan Del Arco (known to many genre fans as Hugh Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation's "I, Borg" which is reviewed here!),

Megan - A cancer survivor who warms up to Sean after her husband leaves her,

and Escobar - A drug kingpin who knows the biggest secrets at McNamara/Troy.

And, like it or not, the characters are often interesting, even though they exist in a morally nebulous place. There is no strong ethical compass on the show and as a result, it is often Matt who fills that role and the show seems somewhat imbalanced. The characters, for the most part, drive the plots, which is a good thing. However, many of them have twists that force the characters to act or react to the new circumstance. The plots usually revolve around a client and the work they are having done and how that impacts the characters. Often, the characters are forced to react to the likes of child molesters, abused women, porn stars, and/or victims of multiple personality disorders.

The other strength of the show is certainly in the acting. While the characters may be ambivalent or unlikable, they are performed masterfully. John Hensley often captures perfectly the uncertainty and tentative quality of being a young man. Joely Richardson plays the long-neglected wife with flawless body language that telegraphs perfectly the sense that she has spent years waiting and indifferent.

But much of the show hinges on the talents of Dylan Walsh and Julian McMahon. McMahon's big screen triumph as Dr. Doom in The Fantastic Four (reviewed here!) would not have happened were it not for his performances on this first season of Nip/Tuck. McMahon often plays the cocky, cocksure Troy with a layer of menace and hotheadedness that makes him frequently seem villainous. McMahon has an amazing sense of body language to portray a man with more confidence than virtually anyone else in the world. He gives consistently great performances and thus makes his character very difficult to like.

But it is Dylan Walsh as the understated and emotionally awkward Sean who rules the show. Walsh is a master of playing the role of the sidekick with the talent who is consistently losing everything. Were it not for similar role and similarly great performances by Michael Badaluco as Jimmy on The Practice, Gordon Clapp as Medavoy on NYPD Blue, Peter McNichol as John Cage on Ally McBeal, and Michael C. Hall as David Fisher on Six Feet Under, I'd say the role was truly groundbreaking. As it is, he adds himself to a significant list of great actors playing awkward characters and he does it with distinction enough to make the first season worth watching.

On DVD, the first season is chock full of bonus features, though not all of them great. Virtually every episode has an entire subplot that was cut out and appears as deleted scenes after each episode. That's fine, but one wonders why they didn't offer an option that would simply put the finished scenes back into the program as they are inconveniently accessed through confusing menus. There are no commentary tracks, though there are featurettes (I would have preferred some decent commentary tracks as opposed to the self-congradulatory featurettes). There is also a music video, a gag reel and a preview for season two. For a five-disc set, it feels a little light on the extras.

In the end, it's worth seeing at least the first season and I enjoyed it, though I remain glad that I didn't shell out a lot more for a future "complete series" release.

For other shows that made their debut on cable, be sure to visit my reviews of the first seasons of:
Weeds
The Walking Dead
Carnivale

5.5/10

For other television reviews, please visit my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the shows and episodes I have reviewed!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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