'Nip/Tuck' is not all blood and cuts
By Gary Levin

"Tell me what you don't like about yourself."
The opening words of Nip/Tuck, FX's drama about Miami plastic surgeons, hints at how the series explores the really extreme makeover: women serving as drug mules with heroin-filled breast implants, a man who wants to appear Asian to win approval from his fiancée's family, a pedophile priest who wants an incriminating birthmark removed.
The show, which is airing its season finale tonight (10 ET/PT) and is renewed for 15 more episodes due in June despite difficulties selling to more conservative advertisers, "is really about transformations, not just about physical ones, but intellectual, psychological," creator Ryan Murphy says.
It's mainly known, though, for its outrageous plots, gory surgery scenes and cases that sometimes shape the outlook of its two lead characters, longtime friends and business partners, both confronting midlife crises in different ways: Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh), the uptight family man, and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), the wild, immature playboy.
Sean's tightly wound wife, Julia (Joely Richardson), had a college relationship with Christian, who could be the father of her teenage son, Matt, who in an early episode attempted a self-circumcision.
Reminiscent of the characters and tone of HBO's mortuary drama, Six Feet Under, "we're not always likable," Walsh says. "More often than not, we're doing things that are morally ambiguous or outright wrong. It's fun for the audience to watch us stumble and kind of fall. We're two very fallible guys."
Audience sympathies have shifted as the upright Sean has an affair with a breast-cancer patient, and Christian — full of bravado at the outset — exposes vulnerability. Boomer viewers — slapped in the face with their own mortality — "did not expect themselves to be so freaked out by it," Murphy says.
The actors say they're a little surprised at the buzz factor surrounding Nip/Tuck. Along with The Shield, it has helped transform FX's image and eclipsed Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as this year's most-watched new basic-cable series, averaging 3.3 million viewers for Tuesday premieres.
"I'm on the lowest-rated show I've ever been on," says McMahon, who co-starred on NBC's Profiler and bewitched the heroines of WB's Charmed for three years. "I get out and go to a bar in Miami, and people are screaming at you. It's kind of a shock. When I was on Profiler ... I never had anybody come up to me, ever. Nobody I know was ever watching the show."
"This thing stands out," says Walsh, for whom Nip/Tuck also is his first breakout role. "It has a lot of layers to it. It's a funny show sometimes, but it can be very moving. It's not locked in by its own premise."
Murphy, who was behind WB's sometimes-caustic high-school series Popular, says he has been "obsessed" with plastic surgery ever since, at age 7, his mother took him to see Ash Wednesday, a 1973 movie in which Elizabeth Taylor has a facelift in an effort to save her marriage to Henry Fonda.
In the mid-1990s, as a reporter for The Miami Herald, he went undercover to unmask what led men to seek calf implants from Beverly Hills surgeons.
From that, the show was born as a "heavy drama about what people hate about themselves and why they hate themselves," he says. But dark humor is injected like Botox, and he quickly saw that the show's romantic triangle and family drama resonated with viewers.
The HBO-caliber sex scenes, rough language, nudity and surgical gore — unusual for a basic-cable network — have earned the show notoriety. But Murphy says the realistic bloody surgeries are essential to show "the lengths which people go to transform their lives."
Says FX Networks president Peter Ligouri, who acknowledges the show has turned off squeamish advertisers, "It's the tone that we present things that puts you back on your heels a lot more than what we're showing. An appendectomy could be presented every bit as graphically on ER. But the fact that these guys do a butt implant, it's almost like the audience is placing a value judgment on that. That's good; that's part of the tension; that's what helps make it work."
Were the actors as grossed out by graphic surgery scenes as some viewers? "When we first did it in the pilot, we didn't like it at all," Walsh says. "We were very uncomfortable. It was so realistic, and it really made us nauseous. Over time, we got used to it, and then I went to see a real surgery, (and) it looked like what we do on the set. I've actually taken to it."