“Nip/Tuck” — Carly Summers (Season Five Premiere)
What are you doing to her Lady Cha-Cha?
I had never seen an episode of Nip/Tuck until I watched Tuesday’s fifth season premiere. The series has gone under a bit of an overhaul, relocating the two star doctors McNamara and Troy from Miami to Los Angeles. It was a move that made perfect sense as setting a series about superficiality in Los Angeles is a peanut-butter/chocolate type of relationship. It also provided an especially easy jump-on point for someone who has always wanted to watch the show but not enough to catch up on previous season’s worth of episodes. Based on that episode, it looks like I’ll be watching Nip/Tuck in the weeks to come. The series is dark, funny, well acted, competently written and (this season) features Oliver Platt and Bradley Cooper, whose roles in this first episode were blisteringly funny. More after the jump…
The basic premise of the new season is that the docs set up a new practice in Los Angeles and have gone from being big fish in a small pond to invisible fish in an ocean of vanity. In order to get a new (and powerful) clientèle the two sign on to be consultants for a television show called “Hearts and Scalpels” (which is a bit of a hybrid between Nip/Tuck and Grey’s Anatomy), where Bradley Cooper plays the lead doctor and Oliver Platt the series’ creator. Television has been parodied plenty over the decades, but there is something about this that strikes me as fresh. Maybe it was the fact that one of the show-in-a-show patients referred to her vagina as her “Lady Cha-Cha” when standards and practices said they couldn’t say “vagina.” Clearly they’re onto something.
Now, will my interest hold for the rest of the season? Only time will tell I suppose, but (surgery footage aside) Nip/Tuck couldn’t be an easier watch. It is so glossy and vibrant with devilishly likable characters smothered in vanity and excess it’s pretty hard not to immediately take to it. Of course it’s also a pitch black comedy that certainly has its specific fans and detractors.
I obviously can’t speak to how the series has progressed this season and how the long-term story arcs could play out in a history context, but it appears that the success experienced by Troy McNamara (and the kind-of rejection of McNamara Troy by Hollywood) in this first episode could set up what I assume to be a bit of a role-reversal from seasons past. Come for the fake tits, stay for the double-crossing friends and help yourself to some inside-baseball television fun on the way out. Sign me up!
November 1st, 2007 at 10:55 am
As someone who’s watched the entire series and as a loyal reader of MagneticMediaFed I feel I must let you know that you’ve inadvertantly transposed McNamara & Troy. You’re dead-on about the role-reversal from their lives in Miami, but Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) is the playboy who’s striking out in the move and Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) is the former reject who’s been embraced by L.A.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:39 am
Thank you for this, corrections will be made!