'Nip/Tuck's' manifest destiny

Ryan Murphy could tell you that there was a grand plan behind moving the setting of his show, Nip/Tuck, from Miami to Los Angeles this season. But it wouldn't really be true.

"It was really nothing but my own boredom," Murphy says. "... The show is by nature a soap opera, and I [couldn't] keep telling the same story every time. It's four years, there's no other way to do a Sean and Julia scene -- it has to be in the kitchen. I was just tired of it."

Fortunately for fans of the series, FX was amenable to the idea of switching coasts. The SoCal adventures of Drs. Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) begin at 10 p.m. ET Tuesday.

"I love the idea of them going from being big fishes in a small pond to the opposite," Murphy says. "... I always felt the show was very L.A. anyway. Los Angeles is sort of the purveyor of trends and pain at the same time, and desperation. I was interested in tackling those themes, exploring the dark side of Hollywood success as well as the funny side."

The show's fifth season begins with Sean and Christian having set up a lavish Beverly Hills office -- which they use to play basketball, as they have next to no clients. Business starts to pick up, however, when a powerful publicist (played by guest star Lauren Hutton) gets them a gig as medical advisers to a ludicrous TV drama called Hearts 'n Scalpels.

Murphy discussed the show-within-the-show, the intertwining of fame and beauty and other matters in an interview last month. Here's more of what he had to say.

'Hearts 'n Scalpels'

"The idea was basically to satirize our own show. ... It's very, very insane and frenetic. It's shot really chaotic like ER and has these insanely flamboyant cases like our show, then it has these bizarrely romantic moments as they're pulling apart people's brains like on Grey's Anatomy. ...

"I also thought, if these guys move to Hollywood, how to do the showbiz thing without doing the Rodeo Drive angle. They have an office on Rodeo Drive now, but I didn't want to do that socialite-of-the-week thing, coming in for Botox. So I thought them getting a job as medical advisers on a Nip/Tuck-like show would be great. It's really been fun."

Doing 22 episodes this season

"It's challenging to sort of have the year broken up into chunks [the first 14 will air consecutively, save for a two-week holiday break, while the final eight are set for later in 2008]. I think it was very clear to me by moving the show to Hollywood what the arc was. I do kind of know how it ends and obviously I knew where it began, so it's been kind of fun and interesting. It's also been a challenge, though. When you do TV, it's like getting on a train ... you can't not have something to shoot for that day."

Fame vs. beauty

"An idea I've always been obsessed with [is], Does fame corrupt? ... We say in the first episode, Sean says to Christian, 'Getting famous isn't going to fill that hole you've had since you were a child.' I've always felt the same way about the beauty industry. People turn to plastic surgery for the same sort of panacea effect ... to have something fixed.

"Fame is sort of the evil mirror of beauty. I'm finding in the scripts that they're actually sort of wonderfully intertwined, and actually about the same thing. It's about having someone look at you, someone notice you in a way that maybe you don't even believe and maybe isn't even the case, but it gives you some quick hit of acceptance. So the dark side of fame is sort of the through-line of the season."

Guest stars

As usual, the show is a guest-star magnet. Early episodes feature the likes of Hutton Tia Carrere, Craig Bierko, Jennifer Coolidge and Daphne Zuniga, and Rosie O'Donnell will reprise her role as Dawn Budge. Oliver Platt, Bradley Cooper and Paula Marshall all have recurring parts as the showrunner and stars of Hearts 'n Scalpels.

"Oliver Platt, who I think is brilliant, is basically playing me, which is very fun to watch. He's not me, but it's me plus other people I know who have gone through that job ... and the weird thing that happens to you when you're doing something and the show becomes really successful and your life changes."

I also asked if Murphy would use guest stars to comment on the state of show business -- in the premiere, for instance, Zuniga plays a 40ish actress who reluctantly agrees to surgery to help prolong her career.

"I can see why you say that, but we really haven't. We could have played the same [story] in Miami, and I think people would have thought the same thing. ... I do think I'm satirizing the culture of Los Angeles, which is the movie business and [the idea that] L.A. makes the images the world sees. I do think that's very true. ...

"Daphne came in and read for the part, she wasn't offered it. She really wanted it and fought for it. She loved what it said, and she was fantastic in it. It was important to me to cast somebody in that part who, however wonderful, looked her age. You'd be shocked at the number of women who came in to read for that part who were 40 but looked 22 because of all the work they'd had done."

The future

"[The move to L.A.] was not other reason than, OK, if I'm going to keep doing it, I have to be inventive. Because the show always reinvents itself year after year. We keep joking that if it goes seven or eight seasons, my dream is to set it in Belize or on some tropical island [laughs]. Or maybe Nip/Tuck: Paris, where they have to let me shoot there."

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