The Holiday Nip Tuck

Ahh yes, it's the Holidays, time to head off to your family or pseudo family's home for a time of sharing and fun or in my family the Rockefeller Family Christmas from Hell. My mother will tirelessly cook and then make us place silver, crystal, china, and linens just so-or be forwarned we will be forced to place them just so over and over and over and so it's been since I was six yrs old. But I have revolted and luckily my Mom's best friend has offered to have us for dinner.

Thank God for the little things.. anyways-in the midst of all the shenanigans I call Christmas and New Year's there is a wonderful array of TV fare from the last year-Talk Soup's Clip Countdown! And shows on hiatus-I'm seriously going into withdrawal without Desperate Housewives, and then there in the middle of December is the Season Finale of Nip Tuck. A smart idea to place a finale in a month of reruns and Christmas-Holiday movies but alas, I didn't even watch the Finale. Why? Por Que?? http://www.tv.com/nip-tuck/gala-gallardo/episode/912025/summary.html?tag=ep_list;title;14

The Show has inevitably and untastefully jumped the shark. Joely Richardson is nowhere to be found in the end of the show. Julian McMahon has gotten fattish( I do not like middle aged paunch on sex symbols) and since I specifically watch the show to ogle him-this is no good. Sure, a real plastic surgeon can have a big belly, he's also not paid to look good he's just paid to make other people look nice. But I digress, I am unsure where to put the blame for this moment in the show that combines the icky with the dramatic and the sexy. Sometimes the show just made me nauseous, but I usually came back for more..until now. I would like to line up the ways this beauty has gone to pot.

First of all, the plotline of Julia McNamara falling in love with the Dwarf Marlowe Sawyer played by Peter Dinklage is nuts. It's just too much for a soap opera. It fits nothing in the show since the show usually pursues icky sexiness bordering on depravity not true drama. It seems overblown and far fetched.

Christian Troy played by Julian McMahon having sex with Rosie O' Donnell's character whom I cannot be bothered to name. But I hear O'Donnell is thinking about leaving the View to go star in that same recurring role on Nip Tuck next season! Oh joy, I can hear the screams now. Please, please, please the sex scene with those two was far more gratuitous than any surgery scene from this show's entire history. Really. Gross. Not cool with the show's original vibe.

Then there is the weird kidney plotline played out between Vanessa Redgrave's character-Erica Noughton and Sanaa Lathan's Michelle Landau. Really weird, hard to understand and again too far fetched. But, I at least found this one more plausible than the above and somewhat more compelling to watch.

And here is the point I hesitate to make, the character of John McNamara played by John Hensley. This actor has aged and his receding hairline is really icking me out. He's supposed to be the young son, precocious and basically good, but he's an adult now. And his face has aged in a way that cute boyish looking men do not usually survive. In other words, he needs to beef up his build, wear lifts?, and really compete physically with the two other men on the show, or get the hairline fixed in order to revert back to his Season 1 look. Sorry, I don't care what people look like in the real world, but on this TV show which is based on beautiful people living neurotic lives, he just doesn't fit right now.

I will give the show's 4th season Two saving credits. The plotline between the Roma Maffia's character and Alanis Morrisette's strike some real insight into the complexity of what happens when one person has low self esteem and seeks plastic surgery to please their partner. And finally, the baby drama for Julian McMahon's character-Christian Troy, I actually want him to have his adopted baby and be happy. I really do hate his ex-wife.

This show has lost it's grip as if it were a metal pot on ice. While the show strives to maintain it's sexy and somewhat dangerous balance but it seems to have skittered uncontrollably of course banging and clanging all the way. The oomph is just gone, leaving some really weird episodes behind that in other shows history always seem to forcast the end. I mean, Friends? This show is not.