Nip/Tuck has never been of any interest to me. Like a lot of stuff on FX, it’s scandalous just for the sake of being scandalous, and it’s probably one of the first examples you’d cite when discussing gratuitous nudity and sex. The characters are reprehensible and the surgery scenes make me sick to my stomach. Top it off with the constant threat of appearances by Rosie O’Donnell, and you’ve got one of the least desirable shows on television. That said, I will watch just about anything. And two months of excessive promos wore me down.

The fifth season finds McNamara/Troy (both the practice and the gentlemen) relocated to Los Angeles, with a super fancy office and absolutely no clients to pay for it. A great opportunity to reinvent a fairly stale formula, the new location is filled with a slew of fresh faces including Oliver Platt as a flamboyant producer, Bradley Cooper as a snotty actor, Tia Carrere as a sadistic prostitute and Lauren Hutton as a vampiric publicist. They are all a welcome relief from the folks we were used to seeing in Miami.

The glory in the new season is how fully they’re embracing the change in tone. In the first episode, we see Sean and Christian watching an episode of Hearts N’ Scalpels, a primetime soap as bad as Grey’s Anatomy but with the cringeworthy sex scenes of Nip/Tuck. They mock it mercilessly but end up writing, producing and acting for the show in less than 24-hours. The cast, crew and audience all click with Sean, and Christian finds himself in his partner’s shadow for the first time. He does not handle it well.  Nip/Tuck’s self-deprecation and pitch perfect lampooning of Grey’s is enough to make this necessary viewing. Fresh on the heels of Sunday’s untimely discussion on the integration of “vajayjay” in our TV lexicon, Nip/Tuck has its own spin on the annoying term with Jennifer Coolidge (in a scene from Hearts N’ Scalpels) begging her doctors not to reconstruct her burnt lips with grafts from her “lady cha cha.” If that doesn’t sound funny enough, imagine watching Bradley Cooper, putting on his best McDreamy face, repeat the term over and over. The rest of the season promises more feuding between the surgeons, their own reality show and an appearance by Tiffany Pollard (yes, that Tiffany Pollard). Nip/Tuck is TV’s newest critic and most unlikely asset.

So now that I’m sold on a show that’s five seasons deep, with no desire to watch the old episodes, I’m completely clueless on backstory. I have no idea why Joely Richardson is M.I.A., that kid who looks like Michael Jackson is married and to the sex-doll woman and they have a child. There’s also the small mystery of that little black boy sitting on Christian’s lap. Are single, narcissistic sociopaths really allowed to adopt babies? Hopefully the blanks will fill themselves in.