I caught part of the new show Nip/Tuck on CTV the other night.

You know when you watch a show that used to be popular in the early eighties, and you wonder how you could ever have thought it good, how you could ever have taken it seriously (cf. Lance et Compte)? Well, that’s exactly what this show is like, but contemporary. Add gratuitous T&A, swearing and graphic surgery scenes and there you have it. I heartily agree with Dr. Wank’s assessment:

Basically just another “doctors in love” series, but focussing on plastic surgeons. So we get some nice exploitation shots of people with problems: A woman who has lost 200 lbs. and now has huge waddles of flesh hanging off her arms and back, a woman who’s had a complete double mastectomy (we get a nice close-up of her flat, scarred chest), etc. We get fat, dissatisfied people killing themselves. We get absolutely gorgeous people having sex with the plastic surgeons all over the place. The shots of the surgery itself are quite graphic, very much along the lines of TLC “documentaries”: big hunks of human tissues going into sterile silver bowls, bloody used instruments piling up, etc. But these guys do it Tarantino style with funky music and quick-cut editing and stuff. Intriguing, but just too voyeuristic for my tastes. I can’t help imagining the pitch “It’s ER plus those TLC documentaries, plus soap-opera bullshit a la L.A. Law!”

He forgot to mention the dumbass guy who gets asked to do a threesome with two cheerleaders and has some philosophical issues with it. At that point I just had to turn it off.