Trading Faces

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It's a sign of the great democratization of plastic surgery that her unveiling can be portrayed as a family event — like a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, only slightly more disturbing. "Having work done" was once something rich people did, quietly, and everyone else whispered about, cattily. Then came Botox — the relatively cheap and painless gateway drug of cosmetic work — and plastic surgery was being touted in women's magazines and on talk shows. This has been a boon to surgeons, but it has turned plastic surgery into the new Las Vegas: once laced with glamour and vice, now opened up to boring normal people.

TV producer Ryan Murphy wants to put some of the shame back into plastic surgery. His drama Nip/Tuck (FX, starts July 22, 10 p.m. E.T.), about two plastic surgeons, one cynical and one idealistic, includes one of the most gruesome scenes outside pay cable: a tour-de-force facial reconstruction that includes a doctor whacking a chisel into a patient's nose. In part, Murphy sees Nip/Tuck as a counter to the bust-boosting boosterism of Extreme et al.

"Those shows are very disturbing to me," he says. "There's usually a one-minute interlude where the patients question, 'Did I do the right thing?' but they're groggy and on painkillers. Then the bandages come off, and they're transformed. That's not the truth." Nip/Tuck is a heightened version of the truth (there's an outlandish plot in the pilot involving a Colombian druglord), and it can be heavy-handed. But the show nicely complicates its morality — the "bad-guy" doctor is charming and perceptive, while the "good guy" is a clueless father and husband — and it's a timely, unsparing psychological look at, well, the psychology of looks. "All I want to do," Murphy says, referring to the J. Lo — inspired buttocks-implant fad, "is explore the reasons you would dislike yourself so much that you would have plastic dress shields shoved up your butt."

What people really want shoved up them, the makeover TV genre says, is a new identity. But people also need to believe that this glamorous new self was really inside them all along. Whether these shows remake your house, your wardrobe or your chin, they cater to the same fantasy: that if someone with a gifted eye took the time, that person would see your beauty and uniqueness, would probe past the lie of your drab exterior and bring the shimmering true you to the surface. We used to call that kind of penetrating gaze the look of love. Today we just call it television.