Nip/Tuck
"Tell me what you don't like about yourself." Ryan Murphy's Miami plastic surgeons greeted their patients with that question and then showed you the surgery — and the sex, the serial rapist called the Carver, and more than basic cable had ever shown before.
Ryan Murphy's FX drama premiered on July 22, 2003, with Dylan Walsh as Dr. Sean McNamara and Julian McMahon as Dr. Christian Troy, partners in the Miami practice McNamara/Troy — Sean the serious one trying to hold a marriage together, Christian the charmer who brought in the patients and usually ended up in bed with them. Murphy said the show was inspired by the makeover episodes of The Jenny Jones Show and Oprah, and that the medical cases were "100 percent based on fact." The first scene was a consultation, Sean asking a potential client what he didn't like about himself, and the question became the show's signature. Every episode after the pilot was named for a patient scheduled for surgery, and every episode showed part of that surgery in graphic detail.
It was an instant hit: the highest-rated new series on basic cable in its debut season, and the highest-rated basic cable series ever in the 18–49 and 25–54 demographics. Unlike most medical dramas it told serialized stories that ran across seasons, and the biggest of them was the Carver, a serial rapist who mutilated his victims' faces and sent them to McNamara/Troy for pro bono repair. FX president John Landgraf called moving the third season out of summer and into the fall of 2005 a "huge risk" against the networks' full lineup; the Carver arc drew more viewers than ever, and the two-hour finale on December 20, 2005, pulled 5.7 million viewers, the most-watched episode of an FX original series to that point.
The show won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series – Drama in January 2005, with McMahon and Joely Richardson nominated alongside it, and finished with 45 award nominations in all. At the end of the fourth season the practice moved to Los Angeles, the 2007–08 writers' strike split the fifth season in two, and the final 19 episodes began on October 14, 2009. The series ended on March 3, 2010, with its 100th episode, which had been filmed the previous June without Murphy, who was in India scouting locations for Eat Pray Love. Its most direct legacy was the plastic-surgery reality show Dr. 90210, which the series inspired.
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