"Nip/Tuck"'s Gay Paradox

Nip/Tuck took the prevailing TV paradigm at the time to “make the main characters sympathetic” and totally subverted it, featuring people who were chronically, almost comically selfish and self-absorbed. In one of the show’s reoccurring themes, Nip/Tuck’s main characters are all beautiful on the outside, but then show by their actions that, on the inside, they’re shocking ugly.

Chrisitian, Julia, Sean

"I fell in love with the show two years ago," said out actor Jack Plotnick, who guested on the show this season as the Ass Bandit. "I really try to limit my TV-watching, so I fast forward through shows and only stop at scenes where it looks like something insane is happening. But with Nip/Tuck, especially this season, I soon realized that all the scenes are insane. So I've stopped fast-forwarding that show completely."

How is it that these characters go from outrageous situation to outrageous situation, never really changing or learn from their mistakes? Like ancient Greek heroes with fatal flaws, it’s in their nature. They are plastic surgeons, after all, condemned to deal only with surface issues, and incapable of changing what’s real, what’s inside.

Still, audiences know when they’re seeing something different, and no one had ever seen anything like Nip/Tuck before. If the point of the show was to call attention to itself, it worked. By the end of its first season, it was the highest rated series on basic cable.

Liz (Roma Maffia)

Acid-Tongued Gay Best Friends and Bisexual Serial Killers
On a show that never met a taboo it didn’t highlight and underline with a bright red marker, it was only a matter of time before Nip/Tuck dealt with gay issues. Lesbian issues were featured in the first season, with shots of teenage girls kissing and the revelation that Liz (Roma Maffia), the surgeons’ anesthesiologist and the only character on the show with any sort of moral compass, is a lesbian. And two first season episodes featured transgender storylines, including one, “Sophia Lopez,” that snagged the show its only GLAAD Media Award nomination, for Best Drama.

In the second and third season, however, gay and bisexual male characters moved front and center — usually in violent ways. Christian is raped by a man. Quentin Costa (Bruno Campos), a reoccurring bisexual character, is introduced to the show, only to seduce a closeted male soldier and have sex with him in the office.

Quentin Costa (Bruno Campos)

By the end of the third season, Quentin is revealed to be not just Christian’s rapist, but also The Carver, a serial killer/maimer in an incestuous relationship with his sister, and a person who is also intersexual (born with characteristics of both sexes), one of TV’s first portrayals of an intersexual ever.

Next page: Oliver Platt goes really, really gay!