The Best Before and After TV Shows

In honor of my being very ill and having only the available motor function to weakly click a remote control, I'm bringing you my roundup of some of the best in Before and After television. We welcome nominations for other shows to add to the list but please, shows which at any time starred Ty Pennington don't count.



1) NIP TUCK

If you've ever used your picture in picture television to watch Discovery Health Channel and softcore pornography at the same time, then apparently you're not alone. The producers of Nip/Tuck are banking on it. This show has had plot lines which included self-circumcision and ass-banditry. One of my favorite scenes is two women fighting over a man while one gives the other a brazilian. If you're not weak in the stomach for any of those subjects, though, you may be for the weekly graphic plastic surgeries around which the show is based. Nip/Tuck gets my pick because of the lengths they go to not make the show about the before and after, which is what everyone really wants to see. Be honest.



2) DEGRASSI JUNIOR HIGH

Degrassi is a show about a bunch of teenagers who like to touch each other and learn life lessons. It gets on the list because a) the new generation of Degrassi gives us a great before and after look at the problems of teens in the 80's and the problems of teens today (the verdict is that minus the cell phones and Facebook they're not that different) and b) it has a hidden before and after which is that the producers of the show abducted a group of newly-pubescent Canadian kids and made them grow up on TV. Watch the whole series and you'll see voices crack, scraggly mustaches appear and breasts magically sprout. Awkward and creepy.



3) COLD CASE

I'm not going to lie and say Cold Case is a great show because, as far as cop shows go, it's only mediocre. But Cold Case makes this list (it may even top it) because it follows the perfect formula of a before and after show: You get little snippets of the transformation throughout the show and then at the end there is a slow motion, 30 second reveal where all the characters shape shift into their former selves and then back again (this is especially useful if you tune in halfway and haven't figured out who's who). I have to say, this is so much more satisfying than CSI or Law and Order with their one-liner, got the bad guy endings. Although I do like to hear Sam Waterston's crack when he gets all riled up. Disclaimer: When they do cases where the cold case is only a couple of years old it is REALLY disappointing. Also, this one time the song at the end was Sarah McLachlan and the sequence is not nearly as good on mute)