Knives Out

It’s not like Dylan Walsh and Julian McMahon decided to put on scrubs and go undercover in an operating room, but the two actors were determined to do something. They had just been cast as the stars in a fledgling network’s fresh and spicy new drama, Nip/Tuck, and wanted to look authentic playing elite plastic surgeons. “We took our jobs very seriously,” Walsh says. The two visited Los Angeles hospitals to witness various plastic surgery procedures. But the research didn’t last long. “I think at the end of the day,” Walsh says, “we realized, ‘OK, this isn’t ER.’”

And he’s right: ER never had an episode in which an actor asks for help because he broke his neck trying to fellate himself.

Nip/Tuck—which celebrates its 20th anniversary on July 22—knew no such boundaries, making it a campy yet crucial entry in early-aughts television. The skin-deep plot description: Sean McNamara (Walsh) is the repressed albeit dutiful family man married to his college sweetheart, Julia (Joely Richardson). His partner Christian Troy (McMahon) is a flashy bachelor who, in the seventh minute of the first episode, snorts cocaine off the tanned, bare buttocks of a stranger (Kelly Carlson). Each week, the docs alter their patients’ looks based on their responses to the loaded opening catchphrase and command: “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself.”

Created by a then-unknown Ryan Murphy, the FX drama featured many hallmarks of his subsequent hits, toggling between outrageous dark comedy, compelling family melodrama, dishy nighttime soap, suspenseful crime thriller—we’ll get to the “Carver,” fear not—and cultural satire. Most pointedly, it made a not-at-all subtle statement about 21st-century society’s obsession with youth and the tangled web between inner and outer perfection. It was TV, and it wasn’t on HBO. “I think we were really being conscious of trying to give a premium experience to a basic-cable audience,” says Nick Grad, FX’s then–vice president of development (he’s now the network’s copresident of entertainment).

Audiences responded with fervor: Nip/Tuck was the no. 1 basic-cable series in the advertiser-coveted 18-49 demographic for five straight seasons, per the Los Angeles Times. Its audience grew each of its first four seasons, peaking at 3.9 million per episode in the fourth. (The season finale of the third season garnered 5.7 million viewers, an FX record at the time.) After its second season, it won the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series. Alec Baldwin, Rosie O’Donnell, Alanis Morissette, Peter Dinklage, and Jennifer Coolidge all guest starred. And Murphy, who’d go on to launch a TV empire with Glee, American Horror Story, Scream Queens, and Pose, became the most prolific A-lister of all.

Then Nip/Tuck committed a most unforgivable sin: It started to age. And what once seemed shockingly provocative became all too predictable. “A lot of times it was just difficult to top ourselves,” says Sean Jablonski, who worked on the show as a writer, director, and executive producer. It ended quietly on a Wednesday in 2010, opposite new episodes of CSI: NY and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and an Oprah Winfrey Oscar special. Now Nip/Tuck rarely appears on top shows of all-time lists—it’s almost as if it were lost in the wake of more serious prestige fare that aired during and after its run, like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

“I think it got respect at the time,” says Jablonski. “But I wish it would get more now because of what it did do. … But it’s such a different world.”

Long before Atlanta, Justified, and Sons of Anarchy, Fox’s sister network was considered a basic-cable also-ran. It launched in the mid-’90s with the live morning show Breakfast Time, hosted by Tom Bergeron and Laurie Hibberd. At the turn of the century, its schedule was filled with reruns of NYPD Blue and The X-Files and old 20th Century Fox movies. A crude Baywatch spoof, Son of the Beach, which premiered in 2000, seemed like a random outlier. Then The Shield stormed out of the gates in March 2002. A gritty drama starring Michael Chiklis as a profanity-spewing rogue LAPD cop, it proved that HBO didn’t have a stranglehold on audacious, adult-focused original programming.

Executives needed to build on the buzz and do it quickly. “We wanted a tonal branding that would speak to a sort of general edgy programming,” says Kevin Reilly, FX’s then–entertainment president. “I was like, ‘Well, what else could we turn on its ear here, genre-wise?’”

Enter Ryan Murphy, a writer fresh off the low-rated critical darling comedy Popular on the WB. The former journalist regaled FX executives with anecdotes about the time he reported a piece about plastic surgery in Miami. As one blank-eyed doctor coldly sized him up from head to toe, insecurities and indignation swept over him. Now he wanted to channel those feelings (and that setting) into a TV series. “He just went through this description of what it was like for him,” says Peter Liguori, the former president of FX. “Even in the room it was so personal to Ryan. It was so clearly, no pun intended, cutting to the bone and to the marrow of who he was.” But Murphy didn’t just want to expose the underbelly of the profession—he had a message. Grad says, “The phrase I remember Ryan saying the most in the beginning was, ‘It’s about people that want to fix the outside but need to fix the inside, both in the patient and themselves.’ I think the reason it sort of stuck with all of us was the thing that said, ‘This is more than a medical show.’” (Through a representative, Murphy declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Indeed, Murphy—inspired by Mike Nichols’s 1971 film, Carnal Knowledge—also told the executives that his bold narrative would center two hotshot surgeons. “He set out to write the world’s greatest heterosexual love story about two straight men, both broken, but those broken pieces fit together,” Liguori says.

The two actors who fit the bill were screen veterans who had yet to feel the love from fans. Walsh, a presence in movies like Congo and Nobody’s Fool, was having breakfast at the Kings Road Café in L.A. when Murphy approached him. “A man came up to the table, who I assumed was the waiter, [and] started telling me about a pilot that he had written,” Walsh recalls. “He keeps talking, and I realize he may not be the waiter. He says he’s having a meeting there and talking about casting. He said my name had just come up and how strange it was that I’m sitting right there. I got the script later that day, and it’s the best pilot I’ve ever read.”

Finding the right Christian Troy was a much harder task. “I think we might have had, if I’m not mistaken, everybody cast, and we’re still struggling. And in walks this guy. He auditions and we’re flipping headshots and we’re like, ‘Who is that? Where’s he been?’” He was Julian McMahon, and where he had been was buried down the bill on the WB drama Charmed. “The dude was absolutely perfect,” Jablonski says. “You know, he comes from, like, his dad was like a former prime minister to Australia. Like he sort of grew up privileged. It made so much sense.” (McMahon could not be reached for comment on this story.)

With not enough budget to go to South Beach, the cast decamped to San Diego to film the Murphy-written-and-directed pilot episode. In it, Sean and Christian treat a drug lord who wants to disguise his appearance (they end up finding his body and feeding it to alligators); Christian beds wannabe model Kimber Henry and proceeds to illustrate with a tube of lipstick how he’d fix her to make her “the perfect 10”; and Sean’s teen son, Matt (John Hensley), wants to be circumcised. In other words, it was a prototypical episode of Nip/Tuck.

“When we showed up to shoot the pilot, it became very apparent that for the first time, for all, regardless of résumé, we might be given the opportunity to be part of the project we probably always imagined,” Hensley says.

After shooting, Murphy invited the two leads to his house to watch the completed pilot. “Julian and I had both grown beards independently of each other because we were going through some sort of uncertainty about where we stood in the business—was this show going to happen?” Walsh says. But they were thrilled by the results: “We loved it. There’s no other way to say it. The three of us just laughed. It was moving.”

Cocaine, nudity, profanity, and murder were a start. From there Murphy encouraged his staff—most of whom stayed on during the entire run and got promoted to executive producers—to go further. In the writers room, “we knew we had a lot of freedom to go beyond the sort of boundaries of what we were used to in terms of network television and exploring the darker, more hidden places within these characters’ lives and their thinking and their fantasies and their motivations,” says writer, executive producer, and director Richard Levine. “We didn’t have to limit our thinking.”

The first batch of story lines reflected that directive. Matt gives himself a circumcision that ends disastrously. (“It was clear from the jump Matt had a lot of things going on,” Hensley says.) A white man requests cosmetic surgery on his eyes to please his Japanese fiancée’s conservative parents. A transgender woman reconsiders her identity after falling in love with Liz (Roma Maffia), the in-house anesthesiologist. Christian meets a woman (Jessalyn Gilsig) at Sexaholics Anonymous and sleeps with her. In the Season 1 finale, she gives birth to the couple’s baby—but Christian turns out not to be the biological father.

“I remember the script for my first episode vividly,” Gilsig says. “There was a scene where I had slept with Christian. We had sex. And he kicks me out and throws my clothes at me. I was supposed to say, ‘You got my number, right?’ They thought it was funny. But I interpreted it as someone broken.”

Back at FX HQ, executives encouraged Murphy to fulfill his vision … to an extent. “It was Ryan’s job to always try to push the envelope and my job to figure out how far we could go,” Liguori says. “But I never lost sight of the fact that (a) this was basic cable, so it was invited into people’s homes, and (b) it was 10 p.m., so we had to put [parental guidance] warnings. So yeah, we would have growing pains. I really lost a lot of sleep. As did he.”

Nip/Tuck made it to the air on July 22, 2003. Perhaps it’s no surprise that critics didn’t know quite what to make of this slick, genre-bending show uninterested in playing by TV’s rules. Tom Shales of The Washington Post sniffed that the show “seems to stab itself in the heart with overkill”; David Bianculli of The New York Daily News concluded that “it’s more artifice than art.” But during a summer in which swaths of the country experienced a historic widespread blackout, Nip/Tuck proved to be both sizzling and cool.

Walsh sensed the feedback early on: “We didn’t know about ratings, and back then you were already suspicious about what these measured. Like, OK, we did 3 million viewers—that’s low compared to a network show. We’d go on promotional tours and be in airports in Boston, New York, Miami, Dallas. It seemed like more than 3 million people were watching. Then we went to a Cubs game. I swear to God, a whole section of Wrigley Field was chanting, ‘Nip/Tuck!’”

A summer run during an otherwise slow season littered with broadcast reruns and low-rent reality shows explained only part of the popularity. Consider that before Nip/Tuck, the TV landscape was rigidly divided between outrageousness and seriousness, silliness and weightiness. Nip/Tuck united all the above in one exuberant ball. Audiences couldn’t tell the difference—and didn’t care to. “It was a solid hour of entertainment, and I think that it might have been a guilty pleasure for people,” says writer, executive producer, and director Lyn Greene. “There was also a high quotient of testosterone and a very high quotient of male fantasy that I think attracted both men and women. People tuned in for the ride.”

Those viewers were richly rewarded—especially during the show’s award-winning sophomore year in 2004. A love triangle blossomed: McNamara had sex with a doll that bore Kimber’s likeness. (“Joely and I were sitting right off camera, inches away from Dylan when he was on top of her,” Carlson says.) Murphy and the writers also introduced a story line that defined the series—for better or worse.

As Jablonski recalls, Murphy would kick off each season by relaying his big ideas and arcs that he wanted to pursue: “One thing was, ‘I really feel like I want somebody that has this sort of point of view that beauty is the curse on the world.’” That somebody was the “Carver,” a serial mutilator hell-bent on attacking women with surgically enhanced breasts and cutting out their implants. The doctors help the victims while trying to figure out who’s under the black suit and creepy porcelain mask … until the Carver pulls a scalpel on Sean. Musty spoiler: The killer turns out to be Dr. Quentin Costa, a handsome new doctor at the practice who, um, later reveals he was born without a penis because he was the product of incest.

Bruno Campos was asked by Murphy himself to play the dual roles after being cast on a failed pilot of Murphy’s in 2001. “He said he wanted to create this third surgeon, a monstrous hybrid of Sean and Christian who is set on physically and philosophically destroying their world,” Campos says via email. “The idea was inspired. The hairs on my arm stood up.” (By the way, Campos confirms that he was really in the Carver costume in every scene.)

Behind the scenes, however, the writers were mixed on it. “The Carver stuff was a little gratuitous,” says Jablonski. “It almost felt like a different genre. You know, it’s like a horror film.” Levine seconds that: “I maybe felt a tinge of being uncomfortable with the Carver. It was very dark. But within it, it had so much tonality and color and fun.”

John Landgraf, who took over as FX’s president of entertainment in early 2004, also had some reservations. “I often felt some of the [Carver] sequences were too long, and we would really push to pare them back and cut them down, and sometimes he would to some extent.” Ultimately, though, “Ryan had the sense that it was really going to be an imprinting story and there was going to be a really strong appetite for it on the part of the audience.”

They devoured it, all right. Viewership jumped from 3.8 million viewers to 5.2 million over the course of the season. The three leads graced the cover of TV Guide along with the line “The Coolest Show on TV.” (“This was when TV Guide was, you know, an actual magazine,” Levine notes.) The entire cast posed for a glamorous spread in Vanity Fair. “I realized the ratings were doing better during the promotional campaigns,” Walsh says. “We started to realize, ‘Holy shit, this is bigger than we thought. There’s Annie Leibovitz setting up our poster shot!’”

And in perhaps the truest rite of passage for a show with traction, the stars started lining up. The second-season finale alone featured Alec Baldwin, Joan Rivers (who was allowed to improvise some lines, per Walsh), and recurring guest star Famke Janssen as Ava, a tortured therapist and closeted trans person. Jill Clayburgh and Joely Richardson’s mother, thespian Vanessa Redgrave, also appeared in vanity-free cameos. “We were dealing with aging,” Greene says. “We had some of the world’s most famous women dealing with the loss of their powers.”

Then, in January 2005, the show bested 24, Deadwood, The Sopranos, and Lost to take the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series. (This was back when, you know, the Golden Globes were an actual award show.) “Winning the Golden Globe gave us such a vote of confidence, right?” Jablonski says. “Like, writing, by nature, is working in isolation. Even in a writers room, it takes a long time to put TV together. Then when you get rewarded in that way, it felt like, ‘Oh my God, we can keep pushing it further and further.”

But the truest sign of Nip/Tuck’s influence could be seen on other networks. Desperate Housewives premiered with a flourish on ABC in October 2004; the medical melodrama Grey’s Anatomy soon followed. “I never followed Grey’s Anatomy, and it could have been a coincidence, but I was aware of the fact sometimes [the show] would wind up with a very similar story four or five weeks after we did it,” Greene says.

There was one key difference, of course: “I wondered if they could be equally racy.”

Talk to enough Nip/Tuck principals, and a theme emerges: For all the names listed in the credits, this was Murphy’s baby. “Ryan was always a nonstop font of ideas,” Levine says. “We were the ones to help realize those ideas. But he always had such great instincts.”

“The only pressure I think we all felt was to please Ryan,” says Jablonski. “He was so willing to take chances and go big and try outrageous things, so you wanted to try to meet him there.”

In turn, the staffers—whom Murphy generously treated to lavish group vacations during hiatuses—were encouraged to keep up the shock and awe. Greene proudly notes that she wrote an episode in which Christian operates on a Somali woman (Aisha Tyler) who wants a clitoral reconstruction to restore her ability to feel sensation in her genital area. In an homage to Field of Dreams, Christian utters the line, “If I built it, she will come.” “Ryan shied away from nothing,” Greene beams. “He never went, ‘That’s too far.’”

Perhaps this explains why Nip/Tuck charged through its post–Golden Globes run by not just pushing the envelope—it drop-kicked the contents of the entire mailbox into oblivion. Christian performs plastic surgery on an ape to help her reproduce; a phone sex operator has surgery to make her voice sound more youthful; Julia’s new love interest, played by Peter Dinklage, wants a leg-lengthening procedure.

Most of the actors welcomed the wild shenanigans. “I was always eager and grateful to have one crazy thing thrown at me after another,” Walsh says. “When you do a procedural, which I’ve also done, you show up to work every day and say largely the same lines every day. Not Nip/Tuck.” Carlson excitedly notes that her character became a porn star. “I had to watch the episode where they did sexual auto-asphyxiation with my parents, and it was like, ‘Oh my God,’” she laughs. “But it was fun. So many things were so absurd that it was fun to do. It was kind of a challenge.”

Gilsig, meanwhile, was thrilled when Murphy called to let her know that her character, Gina, would be killed when she falls off a rooftop during a romp with Christian. “She got fucked off a building!” she says. “Of course she did. As outlandish as it is, it’s also fitting.”

Murphy’s bosses, on the other hand, had strong reservations about the ultra-racy content. “I was sometimes uncomfortable being the voice of institutional authority of the network, but it was my job—and Ryan has always been somebody who rebels very strongly against institutional authority,” Landgraf says. “I don’t think I was as patient and elegant a communicator back then. I don’t think Ryan was either. So yeah, we were two very stubborn people who sometimes really got into it with each other.”

The content wasn’t necessarily an issue for advertisers. “We did a very good job of going above and beyond to make sure that people were aware The Shield and Nip/Tuck were for adults, and about 95 percent of the Nip/Tuck audience was 17 or older,” says longtime FX communications chief John Solberg. “So we could stand behind the content of our shows.” To that end, Greene says that the only time producers had to perform their own nip/tuck was during a scene in which kids looked through a window and saw Santa Claus screwing an elf. “The objection was that we cannot have children involved,” she says. Grad says that the rated-R scene “sort of rings a bell, but I don’t remember.”

The bigger problem—one that would plague other Murphy series—was on the creative side. When a novel narrative constantly tries to one-up itself, it runs the risk of desensitizing its hungry audience and losing its credibility and cultural appeal. “Sometimes he would go to places that I wish were a little slower or a little more restrained, or felt a little bit more grounded,” Landgraf says. “I would push and Nick would push in that direction. Sometimes there might be some benefit to the show that came out of that.”

And beyond sexual taboos, Nip/Tuck walked an extremely fine line—and arguably crossed it—when it delved into more serious and controversial topics. Hensley says he had strong reservations about a Season 3 story line in which Matt takes home a trans woman named Cherry Peck (Drag Race’s Willam Belli), only to beat her up when he realizes that she’s trans. “It was the only time I was privately like, ‘This is a little dark,’” he says before pausing. “That’s the wrong word to use. This was the only time I looked at it and said to myself, ‘Is this valuable to the story or just trying to be shocking for shocking’s sake?’”

In subsequent episodes, Matt would shave his head and start dating a neo-Nazi played by Brittany Snow, whose deranged father eventually makes him cut off Cherry’s penis. (The Washington Post later called this plotline “brutal, outlandish and completely cringe-inducing.”) Hensley says he has fond memories of working with the “sweet and cool and lovely” Snow, but from a plot standpoint, “her arc was like a symptom or an aftereffect of what happened with Willam’s character. It was really violent.” Ultimately, though, he went along with it: “I think I intuited, like, ‘Oh, it’s going in a direction. I don’t get to make the words that come out of my mouth. I’m just going along for the ride.’”

Landgraf made peace with Murphy’s taste as well, explaining that Nip/Tuck was the first of many successful FX offerings to showcase Murphy’s signature “Grand Guignol” macabre style. “Ryan’s aesthetic prevailed,” he says. “And as we can see—we didn’t know that at the time—there is an entire Ryan Murphy aesthetic, right?”

It’s never pretty when any TV series begins to show its age, let alone a show that focuses on the futile quest for flawlessness. By July 2008, Mad Men was the new king of prestige TV, with Breaking Bad ready to ascend. True Blood, which premiered on HBO that September, specialized in gothic horror and became HBO’s most-watched series since The Sopranos. The CW’s breakout hit Gossip Girl provided glossy young adult melodrama. Nip/Tuck no longer played like a unique must-see, which was reflected in its ratings—its fifth season was less popular in the 18-49 demographic than both Burn Notice and The Closer. It was time for it to pack its knives and go.

Landgraf made the announcement during a press conference for the Television Critics Association, adding that the show would end in 2011 with a nice, round 100 episodes. He reiterates now that it was a mutual decision with Murphy: “If you announce to an audience that the creator has decided that the show is going to end … as painful as it may be for an audience to say goodbye to a show and characters, they at least understand that the decision was made by the person that created the show. It wasn’t just a network taking it away from them.”

“I think Ryan knew when the show would end,” Liguori adds. “That’s really important when you have no more stories to tell.”

By then, Murphy had reset his show and moved the characters to L.A., where the doctors consulted on a hit medical drama titled Hearts ’n’ Scalpels. (Bradley Cooper pops up as that actor with a self-fellatio-induced neck injury.) Viewers responded with a collective shrug. “I think we could have ended two years earlier,” Walsh says. “We were starting to repeat ourselves a bit. The show was fun. People were still loving it. We loved doing it. But I think we did feel a little bit tired of the repetition. And that’s a challenge on any show. But the way our show was structured, every episode felt almost like a season finale.”

Watching as a fan, Reilly, who had moved back to NBC, also noticed the decline of the show he’d helped green-light years earlier. “I thought it did lose its footing at a particular moment,” he says. “You know, it was getting a little bit untethered. So it was bothering me a little bit. But that wasn’t my call anymore.”

But the drama and palpable tension weren’t confined to the screen. Greene is careful when discussing shifts in the behaviors of certain fellow actors—she doesn’t name anyone in particular—but she does hint at inflated egos on the set. “When we first started, they were guys who got a great break on a TV series,” she says. “And when we ended … I don’t mind saying they were not at their best.” She chalks it up to the glare of the spotlight: “You’re not just the everyday Joe. I don’t want to diss them. It was the result of being ‘in it.’”

“Things became so segregated, and it would become so weird,” Hensley says. “It had become so isolated and isolating. I couldn’t even tell you whether the writers were mailing it in. It was just very clear and it was just communicated as clearly as possible that there was absolute disdain for the actors.”

Jablonski, though, counters this assertion: “Look, there are always going to be camps between producers, writers, actors, and production. You know, it’s sort of the same way that you never want your agent to be your friend. You know, because it’s a business.”

And in the end, even the best friends who made up the world’s greatest heterosexual love story called it quits. The McNamara-Troy surgical offices closed for good on March 3, 2010. (Because production had wrapped the previous June, the last episode aired a year ahead of schedule.) Murphy—who wrote the last episode—had already struck gold again via the shinier, happier Glee on Fox. “Ryan and I didn’t talk about, ‘Oh, things turned sour over there,’ but I was hearing they were having their hands full,” Reilly recalls. “That’s just Ryan anxious to do something different. I mean, that’s a pretty radical departure, going to Glee from Nip/Tuck.”

Jablonski admits there was a “melancholic” vibe on that last day of shooting, as Murphy wasn’t even on the set because he was busy directing the big-screen adaptation of Eat, Pray, Love. “Everybody was one foot out the door already,” he says. “It didn’t feel like a celebration. It felt like an obligation to get it done.”

Over the last 20 years, Walsh hasn’t often revisited that tone-setting pilot. “The last time I did, I kind of cringed a little bit—only in the way that most actors do when they go back,” he says. “There are some broad strokes. There’s some funny stuff. But Ryan had that vision, and he pulled it off.”

No, Nip/Tuck may not boast many accolades or a mantel’s worth of gold awards. But it’s one of the series of the era that thematically resonates in today’s image-obsessed society. Can you honestly say the same about Six Feet Under, Veronica Mars, and House? Both Grad and Landgraf, for that matter, acknowledge that a reboot could perform effortlessly in 2023: “Oh my God, look at Instagram,” Grad says. “The message hasn’t changed at all. People are still obsessed with appearance.” Landgraf agrees: “I think we were in the early days of a narcissism epidemic back when Nip/Tuck was made. But I don’t think the epidemic is past us. I don’t think it’s waned. If anything, it’s intensified.”

That said, it probably won’t happen: Though Murphy is reportedly on the verge of signing a megabucks deal to return to Disney and Fox from Netflix, the show is owned and copyrighted by Warner Bros. Television. All 100 episodes can be queued up on Hulu, however. “You can watch it if you just want to veg out and just go, ‘Like, what the hell?!’ or dive into the characters and the message,” Carlson says. “That’s a well-written show when you can watch it either way.”

Just note that for all those cosmetically successful surgeries, nobody walked away richer or happier or better. And as for that infamous opening question? Think long and hard before answering. Or asking. “Yesterday in New York, somebody stopped me and asked if I would mind saying, ‘Tell me what you don’t like about yourself,’” Walsh says. “I don’t think people realize how offensive that phrase really is.”