Nip/Tuck - Season 6 Review

US Airdate: October 14th 2009 – March 3rd 2010

As the show enters it’s final season, both Sean and Christian are forced to put business above friendship and as Liz prepares for motherhood, Matt hooks up with the last person who should be around kids and Kimber meets an unfortunate ending while Julia occasionally pops up here and there.

Final Cut: They always say that it’s best for a television show to know where exactly to end and I can’t help but wonder if Nip/Tuck’s last year adheres to that rule or if it became a series that perhaps outstayed its welcome. Unwisely spanning the fifth season throughout the space of three years wasn’t the brightest of ideas on Ryan Murphy’s part and there’s something in particular about this season that heightens feelings of fatigue to be perfectly honest.

Hitting on the recession has become such a popular theme with most TV shows at the minute that it’s not entertaining to watch and nor have we heard anything new so watching both the business and Sean’s financial struggles throughout the season doesn’t make the kind of emotional dent that it might have done maybe a season ago to be brutally honest.

Also I can’t help but think that perhaps Ryan Murphy’s reduced running of this series (along with the previous year) may also come into how the quality from this series is noticeably all over the place. While he was off getting Glee off the ground, it seems that the writers were going through a myriad of different storylines that all had differing potentials but never really reached them.

First of all, there’s Teddy. Rose MacGowen replacing Katee Sackhoff in the role was fine – she works well with Dylan Walsh and the character’s still interesting but she’s also too short lived. Only lasting five episodes and then being killed by a random serial killer might have some poetic justice to Teddy but it’s a disappointing way to bump off a character that at least could’ve lasted a bit longer, especially given that this season was lacking in interesting villains.

And there’s the arrival of Sean’s younger brother, Brendan. He’s no sooner on the show, then he leaves again because Christian managed to successfully widen the gap between Sean and his brother during his own little drug spiral, which is another plot that’s poorly developed as well this year. We wait six seasons to see someone from Sean’s family and we barely get time to know the guy – bad move, writers.

Sean and Christian’s relationship is another sour point of this season too. Through thick and thin, we’ve always been left to believe that the two of them would still have a friendship by the time this show would end but every season has seemingly chipped away at it that by the time they both come to their seperate ways in the last ever episode – the show’s 100th, it’s actually a relief. I’m pretty sure that’s not the emotion I should be feeling about their friendship eroding but the show certainly ended their once interesting dynamic on a sad note.

As for Liz, well divorcing Christian was never going to be easy and while she failed to finally find someone to love her, she did at least get a baby out of the deal with Sean as well as becoming a partner in the business, so overall, Liz is probably the only person to have really benefitted from this ending.

Other people who didn’t benefit included Julia being married off to some random English guy but at least she managed to stop both Sean and Christian in their tracks from pursuing her for the umpteenth time and that’s doing much better than either Kimber or Matt to be honest. Julia really isn’t that much of a big deal this season and that’s probably one of the better things about this year.

However, I’m still not sure who got the worst deal – Kimber for marrying Christian again, becoming miserable, having an affair with Sean that was impossible to care about and ending it all off-screen or Matt, who decided to sabotage a good thing with Ramona so that he could be Ava’s whipping boy until she tires of him. That coupled with his complete ease at using Jenna to get back with Ava and that mind numbingly stupid storyline at the start of the year of him being a mime robber were more than enough to make me realise that Matt is still one of the worst TV characters ever written and that this series has had it’s day.

The last episode of the series isn’t horrible and there are some nice emotional beats but after six seasons and 100 episodes, the show more or less came to a whimper of an ending, rather than the bang that it should’ve ended with. It’s not that I’m against the finale being somewhat more subdued compared to the outlandish stuff the series has mostly given us but still, the ending was a major letdown. I can only hope that this isn’t a fate that visits Ryan Murphy again with Glee.

DVD EXTRAS: This show’s never been awash with plentiful extras and for a final DVD set, don’t expect much here. Apart from deleted scenes and blooper, the only other offering seems to be a feature on the psychology of plastic surgery and that’s really your lot.

EPISODE RATINGS

6x01: Don Hoberman = 7/10, 6x02: Enigma = 7/10,
6x03: Briggitte Reinholt = 8/10, 6x04: Jenny Juggs = 8/10,
6x05: Abigail Sullivan = 6/10, 6x06: Alexis Stone = 8/10,
6x07: Alexis Stone 2 = 7/10, 6x08: Lola Wlodkowski = 9/10,
6x09: Benny Nilsson = 7/10, 6x10: Wesley Clovis = 7/10,
6x11: Dan Daly = 8/10, 6x12: Willow Banks = 7/10,
6x13: Joel Seabrook = 9/10, 6x14: Sheila Carlton = 8/10,
6x15: Virginia Hayes = 7/10, 6x16: Dr. Griffin = 7/10,
6x17: Christian Troy 2 = 8/10, 6x18: Walter And Edith Krieger = 7/10,
6x19: Hiro Yoshimura = 6/10.

Season 6 is currently available on DVD.