Rhymes with "Tuck"
Saying that Nip/Tuck has been steadily declining is like saying that a crashing airplane is steadily losing altitude. By the end of last season viewers of the show were subjected to so many ridiculous plot twists, absurd changes of characters’ motivations, pointless revelations and general stupidity that the show’s writers were finally forced to clear the decks by moving the two main characters to an entirely different city. If anyone thought this was going to bring improvements, they were proved painfully, egregiously wrong during the Nip/Tuck fifth season premiere.
The show has become so incredibly poor the best thing in it is Oliver Platt and even he — who can always be counted on to be entertaining, even when hilariously miscast (as in “Ready to Rumble”) — even he sucks. The biggest problem of them all is that the show’s writers, having completely run out of ideas at least a season and a half ago, have fallen back on the worst, laziest source of story ideas plaguing TV: They’ve decided to write about TV. Thus we find Drs. McNamara and Troy being hired as consultants for a medical show which is supposed to be really bad but which actually manages to make Nip/Tuck look even worse when the two characters begin criticizing the show-within-the-show with zingers easily leveled at the show itself. “How can we make this series as bad as humanly possible?” the writers must have asked themselves, and then arrived at the answer: Self-awareness!
Beyond that there are many, many smaller mistakes, including bad dialogue, wooden acting, brain-dead plotting, lame staging, shoddy-looking sets, crappy music, and the reanimated corpse of Tia Carrere’s career.
There is one small glimmer of hope, however, and that is the faintly satanic nimbus surrounding Paula Marshall, the Show Killer (on set for at least four episodes as Sean’s love interest/reason to parade around naked so we can see his butt). If her dark magic isn’t canceled out by the extreme awfulness that has become Nip/Tuck, perhaps it’ll grow to envelop Ryan Murphy’s imbecile child.
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