Well folks, this is it–the end of a long and strange trip with the boys out at Nip / Tuck: the sixth and final season.  The folks out at Warner Brothers sent me a copy of this one for review, and I have to admit, I was impressed.

I hadn’t watched a lot of Nip / Tuck before–every so often I’d catch an episode–but watching the sixth season bit by bit was just incredible.  See, back in its day (like the first five seasons, give or take) McNamara / Troy was a big deal in the plastic surgery game.  They were making money hand over fist and throwing it out about as rapidly.

But then, in a maneuver that I positively LOVE them for, they got hit by the credit crisis back in 2008 (that’s technically still going on right now) and the bottom fell out of the plastic surgery market.  The sixth season will see them grappling with the fallout of that credit crunch, reinventing themselves, trying desperately to survive the disasters that befall them.  The Christian / Liz marriage is in flames and both parties are battling, legally and personally.  Kimber’s line of…”adult merchandise”…is buckling.  Matt’s mime career is an even worse disaster than expected, and frankly, the horrors just keep on coming.  Will McNamara / Troy collapse under the weight of its sheer blinding obsolescence?  Or will they recover to see the light of a new day?  This is where all those questions get answered, once and for all.

Like I said, I LOVE that they did this.  This is like what might have happened on, say, Dynasty or Falcon Crest if Black Monday had hit them, and you never saw that kind of thing happen on any of those shows.

It’s a strange, impressive sort of hybrid drama, part medical show (the plastic surgery jargon is REALLY impressive and at least sounds authentic.  Bits of it actually are, I think.) , part rich-people-drama, part romance drama, lots of different kinds of dramas all welded together into this frightening chimera of drama.  And this is probably why it lasted six seasons.

Seriously, I”m all sorts of impressed with this one, and if you’ve only just started, or have been in since day one, you’re going to love the last gasp of Nip / Tuck.  And lest you think it’s all drama, there will be some laughs in here too.  I won’t spoiler, but sometimes, Nip / Tuck will get hilarious.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Nip / Tuck The Sixth and Final Season an eight out of ten for being all kinds of great drama–it may well be one of the best dramas out there, and if you’re even vaguely into drama, then you’re going to love this one.

If you were a child of the eighties, you might well remember the prime time soap opera glory that was Falcon Crest.  For some strange reason, I, a young lad, remember watching this show, even though I didn’t understand a lot of it.  This isn’t such an outlandish memory, as the show lasted fully nine seasons.

Thus, when the crew out at Warner Brothers offered to send me a copy of the complete first season of Falcon Crest, I fairly leapt at the opportunity.

Falcon Crest revolves around the Gioberti / Channings, a powerful family of vintners who have lots of infighting over the direction the Falcon Crest Winery should take.  Led by the family matriarch, Angela Channing, the Falcon Crest experience begins when Jason Gioberti dies in an unfortunate “accident”, thus prompting the return of Jason’s son Lance, who takes over a tiny piece of Falcon Crest, much to Angela’s dismay.  Apparently, the grapes on Lance’s chunk are all that stands between a merely average wine and a truly great one, and Angela can’t stand being at anyone’s mercy for choice product.

Falcon Crest was, as eighties dramas went, commonly regarded as “middle of the road”, being somewhat more extravagant and genteel than Dallas, but more subdued and conservative than Dynasty.   And indeed, it does fit into this sort of description fairly well.  It does have that “depiction of the rich” edge to it, but they’re all, in their way, craftsmen, so it’s not quite just the idle rich enjoying their playtime for an hour a week.

Being as the show went on for nearly a decade, it does have a tendency to move a little slowly.  But there is a LOT going on here, even if you’ll only get it in tiny little increments a very, very little at a time.  Suspense is the order of the day here as you discover, little by little, what all’s going on in the deep and twisted world of Falcon Crest.

So if you’re into soap operas or suspense dramas, but hate that they never seem to end, you might want to give Falcon Crest a try with its very definite ending point, and the complete first season is a great place to start.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this fairly immersive if somewhat slow massive drama a seven out of ten–it may be glacial, but man, does it know how to tell a story.