Nip/Tuck

Nip/Tuck (premiered July 22, 2003) is an American drama television series created by Ryan Murphy for FX Networks. It follows the lives of two Miami plastic surgeons, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), as their lives fall apart under the stress of greed, envy, lust and crime. The show, while not strictly a soap opera, has some story arcs.

Main characters

• Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh)- A plastic surgeon nearing middle age and trying to come to terms with the choices he has made in his life. For near two decades he has run the McNamara/Troy plastic surgery clinic with his best friend, Christian Troy. Sean believes that he went into plastic surgery to help repair the bodies of the deformed and the mutilated, but became sidetracked in performing vanity procedures. When the show begins, he is considering going into pro-bono work. He has been married to his college sweetheart Julia for 17 years, and they have one child together, Annie. For years he and Julia raised a boy named Matt, with Sean believing it was his child; he later discovered that Matt was in fact the son of Christian Troy. When Sean finds out in the second season, he and Julia seperate, leading to a divorce in Season 3.
• Christian Troy (Julian McMahon)- Sean's plastic surgery partner. He, too, is nearing middle age, but participates in a never-ending quest to feel and appear young. His life has been an endless succession of seducing and sleeping with women, only to cast them off once he's gotten the sexual satisfaction he wants from them. It has been hinted at that Christian's borderline deviant sexual behavior may be rooted in the severe sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his step-father. When he and Sean were in college together, he had a one-night-stand with Sean's then-fiancee, Julia, and impregnated her. For years, Julia told Sean that the child was his, never informing either he or Christian who the child's actual father was. In the second season of the show, Julia finally reveals who Matt's true father is, though it doesn't change Matt and Christian's avuncular relationship.
• Julia McNamara (Joely Richardson)- Sean's emotionally unstable wife of 17 years. When the show begins she is beginning to reconsider marrying Sean, and throughout the course of the first season she considers (and attempts) several affairs, including one with Christian (which is thwarted when Julia arrives at his apartment only to find Christian already sleeping with twins) and a college student several years her junior. The pilot episode makes clear her disloyal and destructive behavior, when she first flushes her daughter's still-living hamster down the toilet (resulting in her being booted from the PTA) and allows Christian to fondle her bare breasts in her living room. Julia's inability to make permanent decisions becomes a motif through the course of the series: She spends most of the first and second seasons wishing she had married Christian. An episode in season 2 showing how her life would've been different had she married Christian reveals that if she were married to Christian, she would've spent the course of their marriage wishing she'd married Sean, a revelation which is followed up by Julia considering lesbianism. In the second season, she reveals to Christian that a one-night-stand she had with him in college when she was engaged to Sean resulted in the birth of Matt; the revelation of this served to finally destroy Sean and Julia's tenuous marriage.
• Matt McNamara (John Hensley)- Christian and Julia's troubled son. He was raised thinking that he was Sean's son, and still treats Sean as his father even after the revelation that Christian is his biological father. He is often involved in activity that would be considered criminal or unseemly to the average person: In the first season he and a friend smoke marijuana while driving a car, resulting in Matt running over and gruesomely disfiguring a teenage girl. Matt refuses to take accountability for the accident, instead trying to gain atonement by convicing Sean to do pro-bono surgery and repair the girl's disfigurement. He later enters into a relationship with a pair of teenage lesbians who want to use him to spice up their sex lives; Matt's involvement serves to ruin the girls' relationship. He spends the majority of Season 2 sleeping with Ava, Julia's personal counselor, a woman nearly twenty years his senior, who was previously involved in a sexual relationship with her step-son. Unbeknownst to Matt, Ava was once a man who has since undergone a sex change operation.