Rewatching Nip/Tuck is like digging up a time capsule full of cocaine, severed limbs, and Ryan Murphy‘s gleeful excess.
Good lord.
It’s easy to forget just how deranged this show was until you’re back in it — watching surgeons with just enough money to be dangerous, no ethical restraints, and the conviction that sex (always sex) is the answer to everything.
Their wallets weren’t truly bottomless, though.
That’s why they’d take jobs no sane doctor would touch — like dismantling a Frankenstein’s monster a crematorium guy stitched together as a sex doll and reattaching the limbs to their rightful corpses.
Or pocketing three hundred grand to fix whatever atrocity the next desperate soul brought through their doors.
And yet, there were almost never long-lasting consequences. Someone dies, someone maims, someone destroys their life, and the storylines just… evaporate.
Hyper-stylized, shock-for-shock’s sake, and if I’m honest? Garbage. But addictive garbage — and I was right there in the thick of it when it first aired.
The first two seasons, though, were practically quaint by comparison.
Even with alligators munching on chopped-up bodies and coked-up teens mowing down classmates, there was still a message lurking beneath the insanity: aging, perfection, and the desperation to cling to beauty or buy your way into it.
There was something worth chewing on.
But Murphy can’t help himself.
He always drags the story down with his trademark soapification. Every meaningful thread is twisted, inflated, or buried under a pile of outrageous plot turns until the commentary is lost in the noise.
Take Famke Janssen’s storyline, which might be one of the most disturbing Murphy ever cooked up.
She enters as a therapist — working with Matt, who’s already spiraling after killing someone in a DUI and discovering Christian, not Sean, is his real father. Instead of helping him, she seduces him. Possesses him, really.
And Sean and Julia — as parents — just… let it happen. Who sends their damaged teenage son off with a therapist-turned-lover?
By the time she’s revealed as a trans (pedophile), Murphy wasn’t diagnosing society anymore — he was manipulating it.
The storyline was jaw-dropping even by his standards: seducing and twisting Matt, written off only after her 16-year-old son’s suicide, and capped by a “triumphant” moment at the airport where passing as a woman was framed as the successful pulse check of surgery.
Did she get a happy ending because she was trans? Because she was a pedophile? It was a lot — and it said more about Murphy’s impulses than about society’s.
And then there’s the Carver. For a while, it was the watercooler storyline, the thing everyone was whispering about: who is this masked, sadistic mutilator?
It should’ve been iconic. Instead, it unraveled into absurdity.
Sean hires the guy, only for the big twist to reveal he was the Carver all along. By the end, the whole arc fizzled — yet another example of Murphy throwing gasoline on a fire, only to wander off before it burned into something meaningful.
And Nip/Tuck wasn’t a fluke.
Murphy had already tested the waters with Popular, which I remember loving at the time. It wasn’t nearly as unhinged, but it flirted with the same themes of vanity, social climbing, and identity that he later blew up into grotesquerie.
I wish I could rewatch it — someone stole my DVDs — but I have a sneaking suspicion it would age about as gracefully as Nip/Tuck.
By the time the friendship between Sean and Christian disintegrated, Nip/Tuck felt lost, veering into ever-wilder directions with no anchor. But maybe that’s Murphy in a nutshell.
He thrives on spectacle, thrives on pushing boundaries until they collapse into soap opera absurdity, and then shrugs when the story caves in under its own weight.
And yet, those contradictions are exactly why people stuck around.
Take Christian: the arrogant playboy who suddenly wanted Kimber — the same Kimber he’d emotionally battered into becoming a literal sex doll — to shut down her empire and devote herself solely to him.
He wanted monogamy with a woman he’d molded into a fantasy, a hypocrisy so thick it would be laughable if it weren’t so on-brand for Murphy.
Or the Christian who once chose to raise a baby with a woman he didn’t even love, a woman with thousands of sexual partners, only to discover the baby wasn’t biologically his — and he still fought to keep the child.
A man who objectified women, who thrived on surfaces, also revealed flickers of deep loyalty and unexpected heart.
That’s the paradox. As much as audiences say they want morality tales that are black and white, what keeps us hooked are the contradictions. The gray areas. The characters who surprise us, even when their arcs collapse under Murphy’s indulgence.
And those contradictions didn’t end with Nip/Tuck. Murphy carried them into his true crime obsession.
After a first season of Monster based on Jeffrey Dahmer, he produced a Menendez brothers series that directly influenced their parole hearings, and he’s now cast Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein — a man whose grotesque crimes embody Murphy’s pet theme: the intersection of beauty and ugliness.
Murphy’s obsession is almost clinical — the shiny surface, the rotting core. Again and again, he asks: which one will win out?
Look at American Horror Story, which might as well be subtitled “Nip/Tuck with ghosts.” Asylum turned mental illness into lurid spectacle. Freak Show presented marginalized people with compassion but wrapped them in carnival grotesquerie. Hotel gave us a literal blood-soaked fashion show.
Every season is another re-spin of Murphy’s Nip/Tuck DNA: beauty colliding with horror, identity wrapped up in sex, shock that rarely pays off with meaning.
It’s always the same dare: Look at this! No, really look. What does it say about you that you can’t turn away?
So, was he diagnosing society, or feeding on its worst impulses? The answer is yes. And that’s why rewatching Nip/Tuck feels so distrubing now.
All the elements of Murphy’s empire were already there: the narcissism, the soapification, the hyper-stylized garbage with just enough truth underneath to keep you hooked.
He’s been screwing with society for decades, and the real kicker is — we keep letting him.
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