FX’s long-running champion of depravity, Nip/Tuck, returned for yet another interminable season October 14^th at 10:00 p.m. ET.  While cherishing pretentions of being a serious drama, the situations on Nip/Tuck are often so crass, tasteless and over the top that they would not be out of place on an episode of Family Guy. This pattern was repeated on the season premiere, rendering Nip/Tuck the Worst Cable TV Show of the Week.

This time around, the recession hits the offices of the show’s plastic surgeon protagonists –uptight and stolid, though still promiscuous, Sean McNamara, and his best friend, rampaging sex fiend Christian Troy. In need of cash, the two doctors decide to take in a junior partner, one Mike Hamoui (whom Christian met when the two men admired one another’s bodies in a shower). The doctors decide to make an infomercial to capture the untapped but apparently huge market for vaginal rejuvenation surgery. To this end they film an infomercial, which they later view with delight:

narrator: “You're as young as you feel when your partner is inside of you.”

Mike is shown slapping two women on their rears.

Mike: “According to Masters and Johnson, sexual satisfaction is due to the amount of frictional forces generated during intercourse.”

Christian: “This simple outpatient procedure restores the architectural integrity of the vagina.”

Sean: “It takes under an hour, and in just days both you and your partner will be enjoying a whole new level of sexual satisfaction.”

A female patient offers a testimonial.

woman: “I felt a lot of shame when my significant other told me that my vagina reminded him of a roast beef sandwich. But since my vaginal uplift, I feel more attractive and more confident.”

But Nip/Tuck does not consist only of humorous references to sex. No, there are also serious references to sex. As part of the show’s inane soap opera, Christian had married lesbian Liz, but now she seeks a divorce, while claiming half of Christian’s assets. Christian mocks, “Your dance card's gonna be twice as full now you’re discovered the joys of dick. I mean, let's face it, yours truly here found your G-spot.” Cruelty aside, Christian decides to get legal help in his divorce, and consults blind lawyer Payne. But of course, since this is the universe of Nip/Tuck, Payne makes sexual demands as well:

Payne: “Take off your pants.”

Christian: “Excuse me?”

Payne: “My secretary tells me you're an Adonis. I'd like to know what an Adonis sounds like when he jerks off… Masturbate. Pleasure yourself in front of me, describing to me exactly what you're doing, stroke by stroke…Touch your dick, Dr. Troy, and describe it to me.”

Meanwhile, Sean’s son Matt -- well, he’s actually Christian’s biological son, because Christian had sex with his best friend Sean’s bride the night before the wedding -- is also desperate for rent money, since he is now unemployed after setting himself on fire trying to cook methamphetamine. And THAT happened because Matt was desperate after he was left by his wife, a porn movie actress who was his biological father Christian’s long-time lover, and who had also slept with his adopted father Sean, but who decided to marry Matt and got pregnant with his child, except she thought it was Christian’s child because…oh, never mind.

At any rate, hapless failure Matt tries to get work as a street mime – yes, a MIME – but finds the position less than lucrative. As a result, he sticks up a convenience store at gunpoint, while still dressed in his mime costume.  And so once again, the revolting, the raunchy and the ridiculous combine to kick off yet another season of this repellent show.

This is, after all, the program that has in past seasons shown viewers crocodiles devouring corpses, incestuous necrophilia, and a serial rapist who bloodily rips out women’s breast implants. Given Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy’s love of the hypersexual and perverse, one can only wonder how long it will be before the high-school students on his Fox program Glee begin participating in group sex orgies while dressed as mimes.

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