How To Watch Television

5. Nip/Tuck: Popular Music

47 5 Nip/Tuck Popular Music Ben Aslinger Abstract: Most analyses of television programs focus on a program’s visual and narrative construction, but neglect the vital element of sound that is crucial to any show’s style and meaning. Ben Aslinger listens closely to Nip/Tuck’s use of music, exploring how it helps shape the program’s aesthetics and cultural representations. Nip/Tuck’s (FX, 2003–2010) pilot episode featured an extended sequence in which The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” plays as Sean McNamara and Christian Troy perform a facial reconstruction on a man who they find out later is a child molester trying to mask his identity. Most reviewers of the pilot (July 22, 2003) drew attention to the importance of popular music to the program’s style, noting “the eerie use of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black’ to dramatize a facial reconstruction even before mentioning the plot or the performances.”1 Nip/Tuck’s emphasis on surgery, style, and music was even reinforced in promotional materials, most notably the flash-based “Can you cut like a rock star?” game on the FX website. The uses of popular music in Nip/Tuck distinguish the series from older medical dramas such as Dr. Kildare and more contemporary series such as ER, as well as point to the ways that industrial imperatives surrounding popular music licensing impact the formal properties of contemporary television texts. Some critics have argued that the tracks used in Nip/Tuck are perfect sonic illustrations of the skin-deep, youth-obsessed, superficial Miami culture chronicled by the program. However, television scholars should be skeptical of critical commentaries that sum up popular music licensing and scoring practices in broad strokes but fail to pay sufficient attention to specific production practices. While such trade and popular press pieces might work to get at a superficial sense of a show’s use of music, they fail to address the complex ways that popular music interacts with visual elements to convey meanings, and the multiple ways that 48 Ben Aslinger producers and music supervisors use licenses to strategically add weight to key plot points, visual sequences, and dialogue exchanges. Feminist media scholars have analyzed the ways that Nip/Tuck works to define beauty in dominant terms that privilege whiteness and an unattainable size and shape.2 These scholars have analyzed gender performances in Nip/Tuck and makeover shows that enlist the medical gaze in order to create aspirational narratives and police beauty standards; however, analyses of television textuality must take into account not just visual elements and scriptwriting practices, but also the ways that television sound is constructed for meaning-making effects. By addressing the popular music soundtrack in Nip/Tuck, I add to previous analyses centering on the visual culture of the program and further explore how program producers imagined surgical and embodied aesthetics in the series. Popular music tracks work in Nip/Tuck to initiate surgical sequences, to “soften” surgical sequences by aestheticizing the penetration of the body, and to bridge Nip/Tuck’s focus on appearance with psychological interiority and character identifications. In order to connect industrial imperatives to textual outcomes, I begin by discussing how executive producer Ryan Murphy’s collaboration with music supervisor P. J. Bloom created strategies for deploying popular music tracks. I then draw on existing scholarly work on the soundtrack in order to analyze how specific examples of licensing work to complicate viewer perceptions of Nip/Tuck’s narrative and diegesis (the storyworld it creates and inhabits). Critical to establishing Nip/Tuck’s “edge” was the way the series used popular music and editing strategies to turn surgeries into televisual spectacles.3 Murphy Figure 5.1. The fundamental link between music and Nip/Tuck’s “edgy” style was reinforced in promotional materials such as this game on the show’s website. Nip/Tuck 49 had previously produced Popular (1999–2001) for the WB, a network that was very influential in establishing the importance of popular music to 1990s definitions of “quality” production practices and strategies for targeting niche demographics . By drafting P. J. Bloom as the series music supervisor, Murphy worked to make the series edgy and to emphasize the meaning-making capacity of the popular music soundtrack.4 According to Bloom, music supervision typically abides by certain norms and conventions that are defined by the producer and are specific to a particular series . Given the timeline...