There is a lavish spot for Nip/Tuck now circulating. It can't have been shot as part of an episode. And it must have cost a bomb.
Here it is in the grainy YouTube version. Busby Berkeley meets Les Liaisons dangereuses meets Kanye West. Lavish, languid, and really pretty scary.
As a piece of meaning making, it's superb. As an ad, it's provocative. But as an act of meaning management, it's hard to read. How does it builds the brand and the show? Isn't there a looseness of reference, a certain semiotic indeterminacy? On the other hand, it is sumptuous and when was the last time we saw a piece of marketing that could claim to be sumptuous? (And when was the last time we saw eyelashes like these?) See the Nip/Tuck spot here.
A topic surely for Virginia Postrel and her blog Deep Glamour. Perhaps with Joan Kron sitting in as an attending journalist.
Season Six of Nip/Tuck starts tomorrow.
Sorry to have been away over the holidays. I am working furiously on the new manuscript. I now have thirty thousand words written and counting. More on the project soon!
See Virginia Postrel's blog here. See Joan Kron's book on plastic surgery here.
Thanks for the reminder, Grant! Fortunately, my DVR remembers whenever the heck it was on last that I was recording it. Close one!
Personally, I think the commercials are far more interesting than the show. I see them as standalone art, for pure enjoyment of the imagery. That said, I admit N&T is one of my occasional guilty pleasures – a bunch of sick, unlikeable whiny people doing truly, truly bizarro things.
I’ve probably watched 10 minutes of the show, so I’m coming at this with no background or baggage. This spot really works for me. Not because I think this is what the show is like, but because it speaks to what FX/the show thinks their viewers are like: Smart enough to get the Busby Berkeley references, and hip enough to dig Kanye. This spot is as much a tribute to the viewer as to the show. If I had never seen/heard of Nip/Tuck, and saw that spot I would want to watch the show. I know a little about the show, but will now almost definitely check it out.
30,000 words, eh? what a tease you are!
Thanks for the link — I hadn’t seen this one before. Nip/Tuck ads seem to play at the borderline of horror movie imagery (the stitches, the giant scapels). It also reminds me of the dream sequences in Big Lebowski.
The three feminine ideals? dreamtypes? that they chose to portray are interesting — wonder why they picked these — simply because they’re highly recognizable? — the Marie Antoninette look (a la the recent movie imagery from Marie Antoniette and the Dutchess), the Marilyn Monroe (busty, blond), and the Edie Sedgwick (the cropped hair).
i would always be a fan of Nip/Tuck, i was saddened about the episode when one of the doctors got breast cancer ~;`