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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: August 3, 2004
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Nip/Tuck, “Naomi Gaines” (Season 2, Episode 7) [Watch on Amazon Video]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Before he found consistent critical acclaim with The People v. O.J. Simpson and Feud, the prolific career of one Ryan Murphy had been marked by a whole lot of output without a whole lot of corresponding consistency. Whether we were talking about American Horror Story or Glee or even old cult faves like Popular, Murphy has produced highlights and lowlights seemingly side-by-side to each other. Still, some of his early seasons of TV managed to hold together as a greater achievement. One was American Horror Story: Asylum, the best season of that show and a fairly perfect season of TV period. The other one was the second season of Nip/Tuck.
At the time, Nip/Tuck Season 2 drew a lot of criticism for tastelessness. This was the season that saw Famke Janssen guest star as life-coach Ava Moore, who proceeded to engage in a sexual relationship with a teenager (her client’s son!), while also engaging in a sexual relationship with her own son, all before the revelation that Ava was transgender and also psychotic, and also … it was a lot. It was tasteless. It was over-the-top and shocking and kind of gross. There’s almost now way Murphy could have gotten away with such a storyline today. But it was also gripping and compelling in its tastelessness, and it dovetailed with the introduction of another storyline in its seventh episode: The Carver.
The Carver was a serial rapist who was as obsessed with/repelled by the beauty myth as the show itself was (“Beauty is a curse on the world”), made manifest by the horrific rictus grins he carved into the faces of his victims. Over the course of the next season and a half (The Carver wouldn’t be unmasked until the end of season 3), The Carver would attack both main characters, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), and be subject to some truly disappointing season-three reveals. But in its initial inception, The Carver was utterly horrifying and as scary as anything Murphy has produced on American Horror Story.
Happy nightmares!
