Letters to the Editor
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I Don't Even LIke the Previews
The wife and I watched the first season of Nip/Tuck, but as I recall some time in the second season we gave up on it. The problem wasn't that it was wierd or disturbing. The problem is that over time our sense of empathy for the characters was, in effect, surgically removed. There came a point at which the characters became so strange and disturbed that I felt like I simply did not know these people, nor did I want to know them.
While I don't expect a program such as that to be all sweetness and light, after a while I didn't see the point of checking in each week to view the latest outburst, the most recent derangememt, the weekly descent into the bizarre and the unfortunate. In a sense, Nip/Tuck is a morality play without morality. As the article suggests, there's no center to it, nothing that holds it together except the extreme and the unpleasant. As the result, the characters devolve, not evolve. It's like watching a weekly nature show in which insects tear each other apart -- "tune in this week to see a praying mantis rip the leg off a cockroach." Do we cheer for the mantis? Do we sympathize with the cockroach? Those who do are the audience for Nip/Tuck.