Nip/Tuck is the key to understanding what makes a "Ryan Murphy show"

Vulture

"It’s difficult to recall a time when Ryan Murphy didn’t have a year-round presence on television, but that was the case in the early aughts when Nip/Tuck debuted on FX in July of 2003," says Becca James. "When it ended 100 episodes later in March of 2010, Murphy’s Glee was already well into its initial season. That overlap was a first for Murphy, but also a sign of what was to come for the now-prolific showrunner, christened by The New Yorker in 2018 as 'the most powerful man in TV' and 'king of the streaming boom' by Time in 2019. In 2010, however, Murphy was only on the cusp of his television takeover." James adds that Nip/Tuck "remains his most influential and important show; you can see traces of it and its success in all of his subsequent works, of which there are many. Today, Murphy can lay claim to executive-producing — and in many cases, writing and directing — a dozen more series, including American Horror Story, The New Normal, Scream Queens, American Crime Story, Feud, 9-1-1, Pose, The Politician, 9-1-1: Lone Star, and the upcoming Ratched, Hollywood, and Halston, set to air over the next two years on Netflix; at any given time over the last decade, he’s had no fewer than three shows on the air concurrently. That saturation makes it easy to map out connections within Murphy’s oeuvre, especially given his penchant for frequently casting the same actors, or to find a through line from The Politician back to Glee back to Popular. But Nip/Tuck is the key to understanding what makes a 'Ryan Murphy show': genre-bending television that wraps its social issues in a sheer, shimmering glamour, its true intentions only becoming apparent upon a closer look."