FX Plastic surgeons Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) and Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) moved to Beverly Hills this fall on "Nip/Tuck."

Kimber, the porn star turned porn mogul turned coke addict, cultist and meth-head, has been tussling with her ex-boyfriend and former plastic surgeon, Dr. Christian Troy, who by the logic of "Nip/Tuck," now in its fifth anarchic season on FX, must always look as if he bathes in canola oil and happens to be the biological father of her husband, Matt.

"Nip/Tuck," among its many other distinctions, is probably more committed to incestuous takes on genealogy than any other show on television. Matt's other father, the man who reared him into his current namby-pambiness, is Sean McNamara, Christian's partner in McNamara/Troy. A cosmetic-enhancement outfit the men founded in their 20s, it moved to Beverly Hills from Miami Beach this season because, as Christian explains it: "I'm a jackrabbit. I don't do slow and steady. I paid my dues, and I want some overnight success."

Lift from location shift

The series needed reigniting, and it got some from the location shift: Los Angeles allows "Nip/Tuck" to indulge the full courage of its sleaziness. It feels less and less like a moralizing satire on the ruthlessness of vanity and more and more like a joyless exploration of desperate sex hatched in a windowless building of a strip mall in the San Fernando Valley. (As if to drive the point home, the namesake of Matt and Kimber's barely surviving new baby is the sex film star Jenna Jameson.)

"Nip/Tuck" seems no longer to be about the misery guaranteed by striving for ideals of physical perfection; it is about the cruelty and ugliness guaranteed simply by waking up. The show has become bleaker as it has become more grotesquely farcical. (Suffice it to say that there has been at least one gastrointestinal accident in a hot tub.) No one is left unmolested physically, psychically, spiritually. "Nip/Tuck" demands the complicity of your self-loathing to really be enjoyed now. A show that's always been about abjection, it now seems almost entirely directed at the abject.

"Have you looked in a mirror lately?" Christian asked Kimber recently. "Your face looks like a fraternity couch." It's a great line — the show's still full of them — but it also describes what it feels like to watch: flattened, spit on, used, washed out.

People come and go, selling themselves to a thousand different devils this season. A handsome black patient arrives at McNamara/Troy to have scars removed from his back; he got them catering to white soccer moms at sex parties. In a recurring guest appearance as the millionairess Dawn Budge, Rosie O'Donnell is abused by a fake hospital orderly, and then so is her new television producer boyfriend (brilliantly played by Oliver Platt), only he ends up enjoying it.

Things don't work out well

And heaven save the children this season! Sean's skinny 9-year-old daughter demanded liposuction. Why? Because the high school-age daughter of her mother's girlfriend has been telling her that she needs to cut the carbs and lose the pudge. Sean hates the older girl, the vicious Eden, until he decides that she's just what his midlife crisis needs and stumbles into circus sex with her: dozens of positions, lots of tents. Things don't work out because, well, pedophilia rarely does.

None of this, however, will prevent Eden from being invited by Sean's former wife, Julia, to spend Christmas with the family (the subject of Tuesday's episode) and Christian too, whom Julia has been sleeping with again even though she has been dating Eden's mother. (Sean and Christian, who are best friends, aren't sleeping together but might as well be because they are living under the same roof, "My Two Daddies" style, with Christian's sporadically appearing young son.)

For four seasons "Nip/Tuck" danced around the idea that sex creepily ought to stay within the province of family life's pre-existing perversions; now it is saying so more directly, and with home-baked fruitcake.