Ryan Murphy
Nip/Tuck

There is everything in Nip/Tuck. Even the most absurd and aberrant things that can exist in the human genre. In the 5 seasons of the series that have aired in our country, we have been presented with everything: a rich gallery of real freaks, who, with their aesthetic complexes and their psychoses and insecurities, turn to the two protagonists, plastic surgeons Christian Troy and Sean McNamara, and then betrayals, textbook hookups, intrigues, cynicism (Christian), and naiveté (Sean).

In Italy, the fifth season has just concluded, with significant new developments and the appearance of new characters, starting with Olivia, the fascinating lesbian who gets involved in a liason with Julia, Sean's ex-wife and at one time Christian's lover (and in this series, there will also be space for a revival between the two, with Julia very uncertain about her real sexuality); and then Eden, Olivia's devious eighteen-year-old daughter, who will not hesitate to plot and attempt to carry out death plans against her (initially) unsuspecting mother's new flame; then also Kate, an insecure and plump actress, a compulsive eater who for some episodes will have a relationship with Sean, which fades when he becomes infatuated with the already mentioned little-nymph Eden; and finally the psychopathic Colleen, who pretends to be a manager of small-screen stars but once unmasked will reveal herself to be a simple megalomaniac with a strange vice (…) and relentlessly haunt Sean, having a decisive weight in the economy of the whole affair...

Now, after such premises, there will be someone, among those who do not know the series, who will be tempted to think that it is a dynastic psychodrama in the style of Beautiful, but that's not the case. Or rather: it could be understood as a Beautiful, but a bastard and embittered Beautiful, cynical and destructive. The characters form a true allegory of the basest lows of today's society: it almost seems like we are faced with a kind of Dantean Inferno, with its multiple circles of the most diverse vices, between lust, selfishness, thirst for success, and diabolical machinations to achieve it.

In conclusion, it is not about staging vices, vile deeds, perversions, and infamies for their own sake, almost as if for the mere taste of scandalizing; on the contrary, the series presents us without too many reservations with an articulate and composite social satire, and it does so by distancing itself from certain prudish euphemisms: the risk would be to make it thereby sterile and unproductive the protest against the degeneration and misconduct inherent in modernity. And Nip/Tuck offers us this protest at several points with the grace and delicacy of a punch in the stomach.