I have recently started watching Nip/Tuck on Netflix. I am now in the middle of season 2.
This is a great show, but man - it is seriously fucked up. I can easily imagine it getting ridiculous, stupid and over-the-top (or at least, even more so than it has been already).
Do the later seasons maintain the same quality as the first two, or did the creators screw it up?
I watched all six seasons in pretty rapid succession a couple of months ago. Watching it all compressed like that makes it hard for me to distinguish between the seasons, but I feel like there was a shift between season 4 and season 6. I watched all of it, and if you’re watching it on instant/streaming there’s no reason not to. I might have given up if I had to wait for discs in the mail.
It has some pretty dark spots. I went on a Jane Austen adaptation jag after watching it to lighten up. I wouldn’t go from Nip/Tuck right into a Dexter marathon.
Personally I was disappointed with how they handled Matt, and Julia, and Liz, and Kimber - pretty much everybody I guess towards the end. But I understand that “and then she got everything she wanted and lived happily ever after” isn’t interesting television. There were some things that made me yell at the television.
I thought the show went off the rails by the time they moved to LA but occasionally there’d be some really great moments or good episodes.
I did like that they were unabashed about progressing all of the characters into truly unlikeable and/or horrible people by the end.
It was at it’s best when it was glib, sexy and unpredictable. Having Christian being a raging nymphomaniac was a huge part of the allure as was the co-dependence of Sean and Kimber’s wild personality swings. The more hedonistic the show the better. Having strong patient of the weeks was a key component as well, it was like the early seasons of House.
I loved the show up through the start of The Carver with Kit and Quentin and the threesomes with Christian and that entire dynamic, but that was also where the show essentially jumped the shark. They started twisting the patient of the week around and making too many of them recurring characters and sometimes marginalizing them too much and lost me. The Rosie O’Donnell episodes were where I stopped watching. I caught a few of the episodes after the move to LA but they didn’t recapture that fun, sexy quality that made the show in Season 1.
I watched and purchased all six seasons. The first two are the best, the third is rather ugly and depressing, the 4th has material that is hilarious or heartbreaking or horrific by turns, the 5th and 6th are different because of the move to L.A. but still entertaining enough to watch. It was completely outrageous at times but that’s what kept me watching.
It got too ridiculous for me after the third season, but the first two were great.
The last season was terrible, and the final episode was BORING. Really, none of the LA seasons were very good. I recommend when you’ve had enough, stop watching.
I’ll echo some of the other comments here. I watched the entire run, but it seemed to hit a plateau around the time of the Carver storyline. The season 2 finale was the best single episode of the run – beautiful and sad, and it introduced me to a lovely Art Garfunkel song that I was not familiar with.
It never rose to those heights again, but there was still enough to keep me interested.
Also, you never knew which guest stars would appear or what kind of music would be played. I accumulated a ton of great songs from those eps. Sure, I could have gotten them just by looking at the ep guides, but I wanted to see the whole saga play out.