TV is the New Reading

Building up

to a big finish

There are a couple of cable productions I’ve been watching since their pilot episodes -- “Burn Notice” on USA and “Nip/Tuck” on FX. I have invested emotion and energy into the characters on these shows, some of whom have seen some huge ups and downs in their time on screen. Both of these productions are building to big finales -- “Burn Notice” to a season finale, “Nip/Tuck” to a series finale. And both these finales happen this week.

I’ll start with “Burn Notice.” All this season, ex-spy Michael Westin has been cooperating with a rogue agent who has been participating in a sizable and complex operation to recover a military prisoner. This isn’t the first time Westin has had to go a little rogue to uncover and thwart an evil scheme. And this isn’t the first time that the bad guy was taken out by an even worse guy. That’s who Michael will be facing down in the season finale.

But here’s what I’m not getting. Michael’s finding this stuff out. He’s obviously freelancing because these aren’t anything like officially sanctioned operations. It’s Michael and his friends with wacky disguises and nothing much higher tech than a cell phone, whatever he can find at Radio Shack sautered together in an unimproved loft with no overhead lighting. Financing for his exploits is always murky and his girlfriend/exgirlfriend Fiona has a seemingly endless supply of C4 plastic explosive at the ready for whenever that would come in handy.

Do you imagine that you, as a private citizen, not a spy, would in any ever way gain access to any of the information Michael Westin finds lying open on people’s desks? It’s an exciting show because it celebrates ingenuity on some level or another but the only way it works as a show is that Michael the Spy encounters Petey the Plot Device in bringing his various plans to fruition. I’ll just point out that the bad guys tend to want to keep the more nefarious aspects of their operations under wraps to keep the good guys from finding them out, so Michael gets lots of breaks, files that are well marked, guards that go down with one punch. Most of the time he shouldn’t be able to do and find out the stuff he does. More to the point, he should’ve been trapped and arrested many times over by now.

And in the season finale, he comes face to face with the White Rabbit himself, the reason he was fired, and what more he will be able to learn I do not know. This Gilroy creep that’s had him on the run all season Michael was able to identify by a pattern of rifle-fire in a stadium that he read about once in a security briefing. How would he have missed whatever he missed in this particular bit of identity theft. Standard for these kinds of shows my money is on his late father, but that would actually anger me, too, so this better be good. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

‘Nip/Tuck’

As for the other, I wish I was more upset with “Nip/Tuck”s passing. I think the show was already betraying a few direction issues when Matt did a hit-and-run as a teenager and got away with it, and when Sean was for no reason whatsoever having confidence issues with his surgery. These plot cul-de-sacs ended up going nowhere and in fact get revisited with no sense of irony several times with Matt assaulting a pre-op transsexual, Matt cooking methamphetamines and Matt becoming a mime and using his not remotely convincing prop handgun to rob boutiques along the boardwalk, and there’s never any consequences. He actually got arrested this season for kidnapping his own child, but while he should indeed be serving multiple sentences, his dads Sean and Christian still cut a deal for him to get him released. Their reasoning? He’s got an ill-tempered cellmate who thinks he’s pretty. I figured if he told his cellie what he’d done to his friend Cherry that he might be left alone, but oh well.

Matt’s out and engaged to marry Ramona, the daughter of a carpet store manager. As if on cue, Ava Moore -- described once as the Hope Diamond of transsexuals -- shows up with a stolen child scarred by disease and she wants Sean and Christian to repair him. Sean and Christian rightly tell her to get lost, so she goes to Matt, her one-time lover, who then appeals to them on the boy’s behalf (after a night spent rekindling their affair). This even hearkens back to Matt trying to convince them to inject his daughter, Jemma’s, lips with collagen to improve her chances as an infant model at Kimber’s behest.

Sean and Christian tell him no, they’re not falling for Ava’s manipulation (even after both of them tried to manipulate Julia to sleep with them on the eve of her own marriage to someone else) and Matt seems to let it go. But just as Matt and Ramona’s wedding is about to begin, Ava texts Matt, who walks out of the ceremony and dives into her limo like a zombie and they drive away.

So Matt’s the world’s biggest jerk and a criminal besides and now he’s left at the altar possibly his only chance at a nice, normal life. We’ve got Julia rejecting both Sean and Christian and on her way to England with Annie and Conor. Kimber has committed suicide, probably. The Carvers, Kit and Quentin, are probably still vandalizing people in Spain. Julia’s mother, Erica, is in federal prison on drug charges and we’ve got Matt racing down the road in a limousine with dude-looks-like-a-lady, Ava, Matt’s first real love, more or less. He had a fling with a fluffer I don’t think went anywhere except she exposed him to some venereal disease or another, but otherwise, yeah.

We are left with Sean and Christian and Liz in the third circle of hell, Beverly Hills, with no real purpose. Sean’s lost the family Christian has always envied, Christian has lost Sean’s hero worship that Sean himself always had so much trouble reconciling. Me too, by the way.

Along the way we misplaced Liz’s infatuation with Penny and the organ stealing ring she was part of along with Christian’s love of Michelle who participated in her husband’s death to be with him and then vanished. We had plastic surgery addict Hedda Grubman who died of a stroke, we had Sean’s agent, played with brilliant psychosis by Sharon Gless, a character with more lives than a cat and who kept popping out of everywhere like a giant spider to stalk and ultimately try to kill Sean. We had Sean’s new wife, Teddy, a serial bride played by two different actresses before she got killed off. I swear if Conor ever tries building a family tree he’ll get an F for making stuff up.

In its seven seasons, the show has trafficked heroin from Colombia inside breast implants, and uncovered an international black market organ trading ring. Christian has fathered a child, Emmy, with a double amputee whose half-brother Matt then fell in love with. We’ve seen about as much of her as we’ve seen of Christian’s adopted son, Wilber, who I imagine is still around somewhere, just always very quiet and in another room while his father is doing unspeakable things to an endless stream of beautiful women. Wilber’s mother, you will recall, fell off the top of a building while Christian was having sex with her, so … there’s that. But what’s Christian to do, once he’s discovered he’s the product of rape who was then sexually abused as a foster child? Even Liz aborted his implanted sperm and she’s now having a second go-round with Sean’s.

And who can forget Matt’s pedophilic relationship with Ava interrupted occasionally by her naked, boundary-free adopted incestuous son Adrien who’s oh yeah, the same age as Matt? Matt, who terrorized his father’s patients at the behest of his Nazi girlfriend. Even Julia murdered her daughter’s hamster before moving to New York to become a lesbian and get shot in the head by her lover’s daughter. She did lots of other things first, however, like euthanize a burn victim she thought was her mother based on Christian’s shall we say intimate identification of her and carry her newly remarried to her Sean’s son to term, birth defect and all, before sleeping with the dwarf serving as their nanny. Sean slept with the other nanny they got rid of, however, so fair is fair.

Oh yeah, they also conducted face transplants, reintegrated a rival’s sphincter and took apart a dead body made from other dead bodies, when they weren’t ungluing frat boys from each other, doing reconstructive surgery on a gorilla or becoming the central focus of a serial mutilater terrorizing South Beach called The Carver, and then making him a partner.

I guess what I’m saying is these men with their backstory and their raft of codependencies, these men who need each other because no one else would have them. These men with their flaws and their chutzpah have been an engaging distraction but despite the rather ridiculous extremes we managed to explore with just a few characters, after awhile, seriously, wouldn’t they lose their minds? I’m heading into the final episode ready for this whole show to have been a “Fight Club”-esque nightmare with Sean chained to a wall in a rubber room and Christian playing the Brad Pitt character.

In any event, exciting as it has been, I am certainly ready for it to end. Show creator Ryan Murphy is a genius and Jennifer Salt has established herself as a breakout writer and the acting in the show is just as good as anyone could ask it to be -- and where else was Vanessa Redgrave ever going to get a shot at such a darkly compelling role as Julia’s wicked mother? They need to find some way to use her in “Damages.”

But the show has never, in a move to California, to the unlikeliest series of eye-popping events and coincidences to a nearly endless stream of guest stars (even if, seriously, you can call that “New York” woman a guest star) ever recaptured the excitement of The Carver, the serial brutalizer whose modus operandi tied in so brilliantly with the world of plastic surgery and whose methods left the question “Who is the Carver?” so open that it could, literally, have been anyone. They tried with the organ ring but that never built especially well, and Sean’s agent Coleen and Olivia’s daughter Eden were too cartoonish to be taken especially seriously. So we come to the end and everyone’s getting married and divorced and killed and incarcerated it could so easily be just a long, weird dream someone was having.

That said, I want to personally thank Dylan Walsh and Julian McMahon, Joely Richardson and Roma Maffia, Kelly Carlson, and oh what the hell, John Hensley as well for devoting so much time and craft in presenting these sometimes brilliant, sometimes awful but generally compelling characters and their weird, wild lives for nearly a decade. Well done and best of luck in your continued careers.

The third season finale of “Burn Notice” airs Thursday at 10/9c on USA. The series finale of “Nip/Tuck” airs Wednesday at 10/9c on FX.

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