Fans of FX’s unabashed plastic surgery quasi-soap
”
Nip/Tuck
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may want to brace themselves.
Fans of FX’s unabashed plastic surgery quasi-soap “Nip/Tuck” may want to brace themselves. Season four launches next week (10pm Tuesday), and it looks like the popular cable series is still riding the wave of success from last season’s shocker finale, which finally revealed who the Miami “carver” was. (Those who didn’t tune in and are waiting for the DVD release may want to skip the next few sentences.)
In a brilliant turn, writer/creator Ryan Murphy surprised all when he unveiled that the sinister culprit was not one, but two vengeance-hungry siblings – played with consistent moral-less verve the entire season by Bruno Campos and Rona Mitra. The finale also introduced this season’s new storyline, which centers on the mysterious medical condition plaguing Julia (Joely Richardson).
“Nip/Tuck” has also been one of my guilty pleasures, and I doubt that will change any time soon. While I can’t quite stomach its intentional graphic nature in so many of its plastic surgery shots, I am awestruck – if not somewhat impressed – by a show that doesn’t mind showing off just how much it doesn’t really give a damn. If anything, the series has delivered to cable some things we never thought we’d see–or really want to, but that’s another story – and for that, I applaud its robust intentions.
What I’d love to see happen in season four is for its creator to bring the series back to earth. True, by its very nature, the show is out there, but what worked so well in the first two seasons was how well it explored the culture’s obsession with perfection – not just physically, but everywhere else. It boldly shot below the waist and, well, we loved it. Surging creatively and in the ratings from the getgo – especially after season two when it introduced the lovely Famke Janssen in a headturning role as a bitter life coach who, we eventually learned, was really a transgender woman – what the series now needs is to give itself a little facelift and focus its attention back to its core players: Dylan Walsh, Julian McMahon and Richardson.
Forget about carver subplots for a while. True, Miami may be sexy and, perhaps, rife with crime, but how much of that crime has to happen in the plastic surgery offices of McNamara and Troy?
“I don’t know if I was in a darker mood (last season) but it was very dark and it was very nihilistic,” noted series creator Ryan Murphy during the summer television critics tour. “When we came back this year, I thought … what happened to the comedy? What happened to the sex? What happened to the glamour? All of which I think we did pretty well the first two seasons. And in thinking about that, not that I feel I have a responsibility to write what people like, but … I thought it would be better not to be so dark, because we live in a world that’s very dark anyway and the darker you go, the more alienating you get, so that storyline is actually dealt with, I think, quite nicely in episode two.”
That’s good to hear. Because I’d hate to find myself saying: “Gentlemen, pass yourselves a creative scalpel.”
‘The Closer’ Closes
It’s not that I’m not happy for Mariska Hargitay for grabbing the Emmy for Best Actress in Drama Series earlier this week; it’s just that I feel Kyra Sedgwick was equally deserving. Sedgwick was nominated for her performance as feisty police chief Brenda Leigh Johnson in the ratings and critical TNT hit “The Closer.” I’d chalk Hargitay’s win up to the nightmarish new Emmy nom system that went into effect this year and threw several categories off – for starters, “Lost,” which won Best Drama last year, hardly received any noms this year – but the “Law and Order: SVU” star deserved the gold. It was her first win. Still, that doesn’t mean Sedgwick won’t bask in the glory next year, especially with what’s in store for the rest of this year. Monday (Labor Day) marks TNT’s second season marathon of “The Closer,” so if you missed any of the powerfully entertaining episodes this season, here’s your chance to catch up. And listen to the dialogue Sedgwick is offered from the series’ brilliant writing team. Together, they’ve created one of the most memorable female TY characters of the decade.
The finale, dubbed “Overkill,” finds Sedgwick and her FBI agent boyfriend Fritz Howard (John Tenney) working together on a case involving an attempted assassination of a federally protected witness. This should prove interesting, especially since Sedgwick’s Brenda has made so many wrong moves in trying to commit to Fritz all season. I smell a cliffhanger.
Don’t Take This Stand
Fox debuts its disorganized male-female buddy series “Standoff” at 9pm Tuesday. Think of it as the long-lost cousin to “Moonlighting” but with scenarios that are edgier – a hostage crisis for starters – and the strained attempts at humor and poignancy falling horrible limp. The bottom line: The show doesn’t work. Mixing edgy real-life trauma with banal humor, which, frankly, never really came off that effectively when Cybill Shepherd did it on “Moonlighting,” is a waste of some promising talent here – specifically Ron Livingston, who worked wonders as Sarah Jessica Parker’s boyfriend in the later days of “Sex and the City.” True, this is just the pilot episode and things need to evolve, but the series hardly knows what it is – comedy, drama, dramedy? What? The result leaves viewers scratching their heads wondering how much they should care or invest in a couple of leads that, try as they might with the material presented to them, don’t seem to know what they’re doing here.
The opener finds colleagues (Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt) from FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit (CNU – yes, there’s a CNU now in the TV universe) attempting to hide the fact that they are more than colleagues. Needless to say, there secret is out within the first 15 minutes. Aside from its somewhat contrived premise, the series, should it last, may have another problem: overacting. Worst offense: Gina Torres. As the duo’s boss, the actress doesn’t seem centered in her performance and the result finds this reviewer not believing one word coming out of her mouth. Truth be told, “Standoff” may not have much of a leg to stand on. My rating: one and half stars out of four.
Greg Archer is an entertainment writer based on the Central Coast. He writes about television, film and being human. E-mail him at
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or visit www.greg-archer.com.
