The TV Showdown: Who Controls the Remote?

I was up half the night again, and it's all my husband’s fault. His invitation sounded so innocent at first. "Will you watch Nip/Tuck with me?" he asked disingenuously.

Brandishing the remote control, he might as well have been the devil, beckoning me with a seductive flick of his pitchfork. This time, however, I knew enough to resist his blandishments.

Having caught a glimpse of the previous week's coming attractions, in which a hack plastic surgeon and his evil assistant plan to kill off their handsome rival, Christian, I said firmly, "No way."

Even without murder plots, I find Nip/Tuck—an excruciatingly graphic Fox cable TV series about plastic surgeons that features weekly scenes of people's faces being sliced up—awfully hard to take.

When my husband persuades me to watch with him, I spend a significant portion of the hour with my hands clapped over my eyes, listening to the ominously percussive music that accompanies the revolting surgery scenes while waiting for him to tell me it's safe to look at the screen again. Okay, so I'm a wuss; this much has never been in dispute.

But then I kept wondering what happened to Christian, and by the time my husband came to bed I couldn't resist asking. Biiiiig mistake.

"The bad guy thinks the reason he's not successful is that he's not good-looking, so he's got Christian strapped down on the operating table, and he's going to cut off his face and perform a face transplant," my husband said calmly. Then he turned out the light and went to sleep.

Cut off his face and perform a what? I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my head teeming with horrible images. Finally I drifted off to sleep, but at two a.m. I sat bolt upright, my heart pounding from a nightmare about Hannibal Lecter wearing the prison guard's face while leering hideously at the ambulance driver he was about to butcher.

As the minutes ticked by, I obsessed on the logistics of hacking off someone's face and applying it to your own. By 4:30 I was ready to kill my beloved, who had been snoring peacefully for hours.