Nip/Tuck [TV Series] on AllMovie

Billed as "a disturbingly perfect drama," Nip/Tuck is set in south Florida, where doctors Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) have built their own medical practice and are enjoying great success as the premier plastic surgeons of the area. Though physical perfection is their business, their private lives are far from flawless. Christian is an unabashed womanizer and uses sex to fill the void left by his abusive father, while Sean continuously tries to live up to the morally righteous standard he has set for himself only to fall repeatedly into personal hypocrisy and guilt. He certainly does so with Julia (Joely Richardson), his wife -- their seemingly ideal marriage is perilously close to crumbling beneath their feet and both constantly look outside of one another for what is missing from their lives. Though Christian catches a lot of flack from the McNamaras for his playboy ways -- which are, to be sure, emotionally abusive -- Sean and Julia are hardly innocent. Sean flirted with the idea of an affair when Dr. Grace Santiago (Valerie Cruz) joined McNamara-Troy and actually realized one with a patient of his; Julia, meanwhile, is harboring the secret of Matt's paternity. Matt, the McNamara's teenaged son, is carrying a burden of his own -- in addition to dealing with the trials and tribulations of adolescence, Matt was involved in a hit-and-run car accident and has been hiding his role in it ever since. Tying everything together is the string of patients filing into McNamara-Troy each day, whose physical imperfections more often than not force Sean and Christian to take a hard look at their internal ugliness.