Six stitches under: Popular creator Ryan Murphy returns with Nip/Tuck, a plastic surgery drama on the cutting edge.

Series creator Ryan Murphy may be openly gay, and his work to date--such as the WB's cult fare satire Popular--may be loved by gay viewers, but he will tell you that "there is no obvious gay sensibility" In his new hit FX series, Nip/Tuck.

Certainly, a series about plastic surgery in today's America could be infused with broad comedy and a degree. of high camp. But the fast-talking, in demand writer-producer had a darker vision for the show. "I don't look at myself as a gay artist, just as an artist," he explains. "I was stuck at a point in my career as someone who did female-based material, and that's not who I am."

Not that Nip/Turk, a savage portrait of two Miami plastic surgeons, their dysfunctional private lives, and those of their troubled clients, has no appeal for gay viewers. "At the heart of it, the show is about why people hate themselves and how they are put in a box by others and by themselves," Murphy says. "Gay people can certainly relate to that in the looks classism that exists."

Each episode of Nip/Tuck, which Murphy describes as a Brothers Grimm fairy tale every week, begins with the query, "Tell me what you don't like about yourself." But, says Murphy, the show is not all dark. "It's about the powers of transformation. That's why we have a psychologist at the surgery. You can always make the changes on the inside that you want to make on the outside."

Murphy says that plastic surgery has become the status symbol that in the '80s and '90s was working out at the gym. "Gay men with disposable income are now thinking that if they can spend $200 on a shirt, why not spend that on a Botox injection," he says. "I don't judge it; I want to explore it. When I see a lot of gay people at my gym who've had surgery, my first thought is, Who didn't love you enough?"

Gay themes are woven into the show seamlessly, with Roma Maffia playing the clinic's lesbian anesthetist and with upcoming plot strands including gender-reassignment surgery and the discovery by a character's son that his girlfriend is a lesbian.

Murphy, currently single and working feverishly on the show, will continue in the same dark vein when he makes his feature directorial debut on a movie version of Augusten Burroughs's harrowing childhood memoir Running With Scissors, which will star Julianne Moore. "The tone of Nip/Tuck is like nothing you've seen before," he says. "Somebody said to me that it's much darker than S/x Feet Under, which means that it's darker than death."