Salon.com > Nip/Tuck

Make “Nip/Tuck” a comedy!

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 07:05:00 +0000

Am I good enough? Pathetic though it may be, this is the haunting question of adulthood. Shouldn't I be a better parent? Shouldn't I be more ambitious? Shouldn't I contribute more meaningfully to society? Shouldn't my house be a lot cleaner? Shouldn't I look a lot better? And, most important: How much caffeine will I have to ingest to achieve all of the above?

All of this questioning can make me long for the sociopathic days of my youth, when I cast aside notions of my own responsibilities in favor of questions like: What's his problem? What's her point? Why isn't he in love with me, when I'm obviously delightful? Am I drunker than everyone else here?

Strangely, I still wake up feeling confused and exhausted just as often.

Am I good enough? Obviously not. Where's the coffee?

Just one word: Plastics

The insecurity of adulthood looms around every corner this season on "Nip/Tuck" (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14, on FX), a show that has reinvented itself more times than most of the plastic surgery addicts who frequent the offices of McNamara/Troy. After all, since its first season back in 2003, "Nip/Tuck" has been, at various times, a medical soap, a melodrama and a murder mystery. But based on the unexpected hilarity of this Wednesday's season premiere, "Nip/Tuck" probably should've been a comedy all along.

Embrace your inner show-tunes nerd

Tue, 19 May 2009 10:16:00 +0000

"There's nothing ironic about Glee Club!"

These are the passionate words of Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), the heroine of Fox's offbeat hour-long comedy "Glee." (A sneak preview episode airs after the final "American Idol" performances this Tuesday, May 19, at 9 p.m.; the series premieres this fall.)

Of course, the irony here is that there's nothing that's not ironic about Glee Club, both glee clubs in general and the specific Glee Club in question, from its casting a guy in a wheelchair to sing "Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat" from "Guys and Dolls" to its prissily out-of-touch star Rachel, who claims that her schedule of taping performances and posting them to her MySpace page keeps her "way too busy to date."

But irony is just the carcinogenic Red No. 2 maraschino cherry on top of this toxically, hysterically, deliciously off-kilter sundae. For anyone who was ever wrapped up in the supreme competitive dorkiness of high school show choir and all of its attendant absurdities, for anyone who ever tolerated outsider, insider or in-betweener status in high school, for anyone who obeyed orders from a fascistic cheerleading coach or a gruff but distracted football coach, for anyone who enjoyed a gooey, five-part show-choir arrangement of a bad pop ballad in spite of themselves, "Glee" feels like a sinfully sweet, delightfully mean-spirited, adorably earnest indulgence.

“Running With Scissors”

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:45:00 +0000

The memoir boom that began in the late '90s is finally showing signs of simmering down, which may or may not be a good thing: If we're deprived of reading about other people's messed-up childhoods, will we simply be left to fixate on the basic and uneventful ones we lived through ourselves?

Now Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' bestselling memoir "Running With Scissors" is here, for better or possibly for worse, to stave off our own introspection just a bit longer, and to give us one more quick fix before the coming memoir drought. (Murphy, who's the creator of "Nip/Tuck," both directed and adapted the screenplay.) Augusten's mother, Deirdre (here played by Annette Bening), is a bright but unbalanced would-be poet; his father, Norman (Alec Baldwin), is an alcoholic who ends up leaving the family. When Augusten is 12, his mom packs him off to live with her shrink (Brian Cox) and his family of wacky misfits. Augusten muddles through this extraordinary adolescence and lives to write about it.

Suds and duds

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 21:51:00 +0000

"Get me a warrant for Goldman. Let's bust his rich ass!"

"Do you always drink like that?"

"What do you do with your days, Julia? You shop, you get your vagina waxed like some porn star!"

"You tell your son to keep his filthy hands off my daughter!"

Do you hear that? It's the sound of claws coming out, of demon red lipstick being applied, of bourbon being poured into crystal, of old clichés being unpacked, of Ming vases breaking into a million pieces a few inches from some insensitive high roller's head. FX's "Nip/Tuck" and Fox's "The OC" and "Skin" have invited back the nighttime soap, and everyone is invited to the party: shady politicians, greedy wives, porn moguls, beautiful teenagers, real estate mavens and, of course, an innocent outsider, to be bewildered by the preciousness and egotism of the ultrarich.

Nighttime TV hasn't been this full of vitriolic vim and vigor since Krystle and Alexis took that immortal dive into a swimming pool, Lucy stocked prescription meds in her handbag, and Connie Sellecca paced the gilded lobby of her "Hotel." But will Fox and FX, the first to dive unabashedly into an abyss of sequins and Seagram's, manage to avoid slipping down that soapy slope into melodrama? Can they jack up the stakes without falling prey to goofy conspiracies and long-lost twins? Can their actors give subtle performances when delivering lines like "Sometimes I hate being your daughter!" or "When was the last time we went to bed when you didn't hate me?"

Mass graves and mine-riddled neighborhoods

Mon, 14 Jun 1999 12:00:00 +0000

Two U.S. soldiers sit under a green military tent between an abandoned Kosovo gas station and an Albanian graveyard, near the southern Kosovo city of Kacanik. One soldier is reading a horror novel by Stephen King. The other stares into the distance.

The soldiers, who arrived in Kosovo only a day ago, look to be guarding the graveyard, which has white marble headstones decades old. But if you stand at the wrought iron fence, the smell that greets you is of flesh not buried. A tall mound of loose dirt stands at the back of the cemetery, containing what local villagers say is more than 80 bodies of Kosovo Albanians killed by Serbian forces in early April, shortly after NATO began bombing Serbia. Some of those in the mass grave, local villagers say, are old people who refused or were unable to leave their homes after Serbian forces demanded they leave Kosovo, and were then burned with their homes. Others insist some of the people were shot.

The American soldiers won't let anybody onto the site to verify. They are under orders to guard the site until forensic experts -- with the FBI or international war crimes tribunal -- come to investigate. Villagers gathered in a mosque nearby say there is another mass grave on the other side of the road. But because the hills surrounding the main road have been mined, it was not yet safe to investigate.