Nip / Tuck

Though I rarely get to watch TV these days, there are shows I enjoy. Scrubs, for example, I find amusing, witty, and poignant. I should say rather I found it that way (past tense), because it seems like lately the show has been recycling old jokes and trying too hard to make them funny, mostly by reducing the characters from sympathetic, endearingly flawed people to mere caricatures. You might say this represents the inevitable and standard bow to the lowest common denominator. I also watch The Office, largely because it makes lowbrow humor the subject of highbrow, satiric humor, and presents in its characters archetypes rather than caricatures. Another show I enjoy is Ugly Betty. Artistically, this show has big fish to fry: it combines a satiric portrayal of high-fashion society with situationally comedic family humor; it also delves wisely and uncomfortably into the pain wrought by selfishness within friendships and families. Such shows both provide a comedic escape from drudgery while also--to varying degrees--presenting worthwhile themes and stories.

What, then, can I possibly find attractive about Nip / Tuck? This show is probably best known for occasional nudity, shocking references to sex, and a cruel veneration of sexual beauty. It offers very little that's light-hearted or funny. Yet between the lines of its biting and sometimes malicious script I detect a bitter satire.

No doubt there are viewers who find Nip / Tuck titillating. I certainly don't, because the tone of the story is grimly self-aware. The characters endlessly hurt each other in their desperate quest to be alluring and to conquer others. Moreover, the characters endlessly struggle, realistically, with the pain their lifestyle wreaks on them. A wasteland of broken relationships and cookie-cutter ideal beauty, Nip / Tuck pulls no punches revealing the true ugliness of our collective and selfish vanity.

You see, the writers of Nip / Tuck have identified the deadliest poison of our society: a radical, fundamental hedonism, founded in the (mistaken) belief that technology can make pleasure so readily available that there is no need to feel anything else. Their characters, superficially, meet our social ideal of manhood: they are sort of modern American Everymen, hypocritically seducing woman after woman between fits of trying to make more lasting relationships work, and concerned about money only insofar as it can elevate them above their peers. Nip / Tuck also shows its protagonists stumbling upon redemption, as when one of the doctors is asked to perform surgery on a nun. Challenged by her piousness and total contempt for his charm and his lifestyle, he hesitantly approaches her after the surgery is complete in order both to thank her for a small gift she gave him, and to ask her to help him pray a little. Of course, nothing comes of it in the end--the episode of the nun ends with that particular episode. Next week he is the same cocky, cruel, hedonistic man that he was before. But in those small incidences of clarity, when the characters vaguely realize that there is something truer and more satisfying beyond endless pleasure-seeking, I find an accurate portrayal of how socially we've nearly cauterized anything really good, anything approaching moral rectitude or an assertion of the actual dignity of man as an individual instead of a mere instrument or receptacle of sensation.

I am sure many people watch Nip / Tuck in order to worship, as it were, at the altar of modern hedonism. I am sure that the depraved and disgusting sexual episodes in the show are not only inspired by actual practices, but inspire imitation for people bored with more "conventional" relationships. And I am sure much of the show's critical acclaim and staying power has to do with "shock value." It does, however, also expose the great lie about our commercial culture--that the result of worshipping pleasure is to numb our senses to it. The show harshly illustrates the terrible emptiness of our "ideal" American life, often in ways that hit close to home, and (at least in my case) ends any temptation I have to participate it its characters' values in the slightest. The latter effect is more than enough reason to watch.