Ryan Murphy Credits Nip/Tuck For Making Plastic Surgery Less Taboo

The creator of Nip/Tuck, Ryan Murphy, believes his FX series changed how plastic surgery is socially discussed.

During an appearance at New York Comic Con on October 11, Murphy, 60, told the audience that the show, which aired from 2003 to 2010 and starred the late Julian McMahon and Dylan Walsh, helped encourage vocal transparency around surgical enhancements.

“One of my first big shows was a show called Nip/Tuck that was about plastic surgery, and I was amazed at how taboo it was to talk about it,” Murphy said at the time per a report by People on Sunday, November 30. “People changed their bodies, and they got in public and acted like nothing had changed. That was how you did it back then.”

The director, who appeared at the event to promote his upcoming series The Beauty, continued, “Now I think people sort of flaunt it more and are talking about it. It’s an evolution in some strange way.”

Nip/Tuck was a drama series that centered on two plastic surgeons, portrayed by McMahon and Walsh, 62. (McMahon died after a private battle with cancer in July. He was 56 years old.)

The series covered a variety of plastic surgery procedures and won a Golden Globe award in the category of Best Television Series — Drama in January 2005. It also won an Emmy award in September 2004 for its achievements in the category of Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup.

Murphy’s reflections on Nip/Tuck at Comic Con also delved into the impact he believes the show had on societal judgement regarding plastic surgery. “With every passing month, there seems to be less and less and less and less judgment about Semaglutides and plastic surgery,” he told the crowd. “It is kind of a new status symbol, in a weird way.” (According to Mayo Clinic, Semaglutide injections are “used to treat type 2 diabetes,” when used in collaboration with diet and exercise to “control your blood sugar.”)

In Murphy’s newest TV series, which will premiere in January, physical appearances will once again be explored. Starring Ashton Kutcher, Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos and Jeremy Pope, the show is based on a comic about an STD that promises physical enhancement.

A comic book description shared by Image Comics, the creator of the original text, describes the story online as, “What if there was a way to guarantee you could become more and more beautiful every day? What if it was a sexually transmitted disease? In the world of The Beauty, physical perfection is attainable. The vast majority of the population has taken advantage of it, but Detectives Foster and Vaughn will soon discover it comes at a terrible price.”

Murphy said of the new project during his Comic Con appearance, “It has amazing action sequences. It has a lot of body horror. It has a great love story. It has a great buddy-comedy thing going on, and it has a great villain.”

He continued, “It has a combination of really heightened genres, which is inherent in the source material, but it was a lot of fun to work on that tone.”