The Pitt is finally back for a second season, and like the first, it will have 15 episodes, with the season finale airing on April 16. Created by John Wells and Noah Wyle, who previously worked together on ER, the show has been a major hit, winning five Emmys for its first season. It has been praised by the medical community for its realistic portrayal of healthcare workers and by fans for the never-ending tension.
The medical drama relies on the template popularized by Fox’s 24, stuffing all events into a single day. Here, we follow the emergency department staff of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center during a 15-hour shift. Given the show’s format, it would have been great to be able to binge everything at once. Unfortunately, that’s not possible as HBO Max opted for the traditional practice of weekly releases.
Luckily, there is another great medical drama you can watch as you wait for The Pitt’s weekly episodes. Once dubbed “the horniest medical drama” (yeah… Grey’s Anatomy doesn’t come close), Nip/Tuck has six amazing seasons, and it thrives by incorporating elements of black comedy, crime, romance, drama, and psychological thriller. Nominated for 45 awards, winning one Emmy and one Golden Globe, the show never has a dull moment.
The Surgeons of ‘Nip/Tuck’ Pride Themselves in “Updating” and “Rectifying” God’s Work
Most medical dramas alienate casual fans by featuring too many doctors and delving into excessive detail about the medical cases. Thankfully, Nip/Tuck exists. Intelligently scripted by Ryan Murphy (known for American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Glee, and 9-1-1), the series keeps things simple by wrapping most of the events around two brilliant surgeons who run a cutting-edge plastic surgery center initially based in Miami, and later in Los Angeles. Hate the way God made your nose? Or your entire body? The docs will fix it.
One of the surgeons is Dr. Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), a hedonistic, long-time bachelor who sleeps with almost every woman he meets. This “Jack” plays more than he works, and his crusade is driven more by a sense of financial and sexual satisfaction rather than moral duty or necessity. The character thus doesn’t have the same limitations as other popular TV doctors whose motivating factor is conscience-salving, not personal survival.
Dr. Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) is the other central character. He is the more talented of the pair and tries hard to be a family man, only for fate to hand him frequent blows. His spouse, Julia (Joely Richardson), doesn’t think he is man enough, and his son, John Hensley (John Hensley), never stays out of trouble. Focus is also given to the plastic surgery center’s anesthesiologist, Dr. Liz Cruz (Roma Mafia), a strong-willed lesbian, who is portrayed as the voice of reason.
The show features numerous new cases, with each episode named after one of the patients scheduled to receive plastic surgery. However, unlike many medical dramas, Nip/Tuck primarily relies on serial storytelling and has arcs spanning multiple seasons. There are numerous moments of extraordinary dramatic power, some exceedingly bruising to watch, others totally heart-warming. The meticulous mise-en-scène isn’t layered or innovative, but it allows all the medical points Murphy has in mind to be showcased succinctly and quite convincingly. Commit yourself to the first few episodes, and you’ll find yourself addicted.
‘Nip/Tuck’ Pushes the Limits of Raunchiness
You thought Spartacus was the horniest show you ever watched? Think again. Not even Shameless comes close. In fact, “Shameless” would have been a good title for Nip/Tuck because everyone sleeps with everyone… and everything (in some cases). But it isn’t all senseless. The medical drama holds a mirror up to a society that often pretends to be totally aware of all sexual and romantic quagmires but is completely impotent when the time to solve them comes.
In one instance, Christian has a false cancer scare and believes he is going to die in a few months. He thus hires Dr. Logan Taper as his replacement. It turns out Dr. Taper is attracted to physical objects. A few days into his job, Christian and Sean find him making love to a couch. Bradley Cooper is present, too, and his character (who happens to be the star of a fictional medical drama) once breaks his neck after bending too much while trying to perform oral sex on himself.
As the lothario-in-chief, Christian is at the center of most of Nip/Tuck’s sex and romance scenes. He is a Bond-like enigma, mean and efficient in his skirt-chasing pursuits. You’ll find him hard to keep up with, but you’ll commit yourself to trying because he is just too interesting. He once hooks up with a woman whose face he deems “ugly” by his surgical beauty standards. As the heartless bad boy that he is, he tells her, “If you want me, you have to put the bag over your head.” He then proceeds to make love to her while she wears a literal brown paper bag.
Watching the show almost feels like reading Barnes & Noble erotica novels. A woman hooks up with a successful man (the surgeons in this case), but with no happily-ever-after. However, there are several decent romance arcs for those who hate the eroticism. Sean is mostly to thank for that. He tries hard to find genuine love, but bad luck and his naivety keep ruining it for him. A “manny” played by Peter Dinklage even gets to sleep with his wife, Julia. And when you thought that it could not get any worse, Sean later marries a serial killer, unaware of her past.
‘Nip/Tuck’ Is More Over the Top Than Accurate… but Every Minute Is Memorable
The benefit or otherwise of plastic surgery is a highly contentious issue, yet Nip/Tuck dives into it casually and unapologetically. The show’s topicality is reflected in its viewership figures – it attracted an average of 3 million spectators for each season, a significant achievement for an unapologetically sleazy production. Why the high demand? Part of its appeal stems from its unusual medical cases. No medical experts praised the show for accuracy, but none lambasted it for absurdity either. That’s because everything is just so brilliantly over-the-top.
“Tell me what you don’t like about yourself!” That’s the question the surgeons ask each new patient, and it gets crazy after that. While other medical dramas focus on life-saving procedures, Nip/Tuck is vanity-driven, digging into personal insecurities and greed rather than medical necessity. Still, efforts are made to highlight the perils of dependency. Such an approach makes it stand out. There hasn’t been another medical show like it, and it’s highly unlikely that there will be.
One of the patients we meet early in the show is hell-bent on looking like Michael Jackson and won’t stop pestering Sean and Christian to tweak his features until he can look believable when he says, “Hee Hee.” JK Simmons also guest-stars as a man seeking to have a woman’s breasts implanted on his chest so that his wife won’t feel too “different,” while Joan Rivers appears as herself, seeking “the mother of all plastic surgeries” to reverse every procedure she has ever gotten done. Then there is Alec Baldwin, appearing as a seasoned surgeon who made the most perfect transgender woman of all time.
The Ryan Murphy project doesn’t cast a critical gaze over professional ethics either. Here, moral lapses are celebrated, and there is rarely a quest for atonement after a lapse in judgment. Christian seduces plenty of patients, and the surgeons are depicted as money-hungry. They perform a few “pro bono” surgeries just so they can appear in the papers, and when a surgery is risky or unnecessary, they’ll do it if a patient puts more money on the table.
Overall, this is not quite the classic medical drama in the Grey’s Anatomy or ER sense, but neither is it the pared-back character-based production we have come to expect in the modern quantity-over-quality era, although its potential big reveals are easily discerned. Watch Nip/Tuck purely for the shock factor. You’ll have a blast.
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