Ten minutes into the season premiere of "Nip/Tuck" and you have to wonder what those deeply disturbed plastic surgeons were doing wasting four seasons, and all that unexplored sexual tension, in Miami when they so clearly belong in Los Angeles.
Leaving behind all past heartache and folly, Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) and Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh and no relation) are starting over, together again. But if they thought they could get by with a bit more Armani and some rented tropical fish, they were sadly mistaken. They aren't relocating to another city; they're entering another world, a land, it must be said, that is finally getting the attention it deserves from one of its hometown industries. The new "Nip/Tuck" is just one of a panoply of shows that shrug off the "Baywatch" and "Beverly Hills 90210" caricature to create a Los Angeles residents actually recognize.
Which doesn't mean L.A. can't take a joke. At first it's hard going for our Miami transplants. All dressed up with no one to cut, Christian and Sean rattle around their sleek new offices, cowed by the L.A. jungle until they meet a woman in a bar. That woman turns out to be Lauren Hutton, lined and lovely ("uncut flesh," is the comment when they first see her), who uses her smoky voice and world-weary smile to create the very image of a local icon -- Fiona McNeil, super publicist. "You have a small talent that you've made the most of," she tells one client reluctant to go under the knife. She is, as they say, just what the doctor ordered. After giving the boys a quick lecture on the chemical properties of heat and exposure, she gets them a gig as consultants on "Hearts and Scalpels," a show about, you guessed it, a hotshot cosmetic surgeon.
Bringing the show to L.A. really is a truly brilliant move on creator Ryan Murphy's part, lightening its increasingly heavy heart and dishing up an almost embarrassment of riches. Between their patients -- early episodes include a studio head who relies on the services of a dominatrix to absolve him of crimes, including firing his best friend in an e-mail, as well as competing Marilyn Monroe impersonators -- and their work on the show, Troy and McNamara quickly slide far below the city's epidermis and into its twitching glands and organs. (It's worth watching the premiere for Oliver Platt's neurotic director alone.)
