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We’re not sure who these people are that get the job to track who’s going nude on TV (we will happily volunteer to do that job for ‘Community’…), but they have logged all the network TV shows that air during primetime hours (8pm – 11pm) and reported back. This is what they found:
Nude on TV: A 407% Increase Since 2011
The GQ+A: Game of Thrones’ Carice van Houten on Her Latest Nude Scene, and How Melisandre Relates to Jesse Pinkman
There was a time when you could turn on virtually any premium cable show late at night and be reasonably assured that you could see a nude scene—an actor at least one breast, a butt, or possibly even a penis. Sometimes these shows were overtly erotic, like Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries or the softcore movies on the platform that came to be known as “Skinemax.” Other times they were ostensibly sexual, but frequently non-titillating, like ’s Real Sex, which traumatized an entire generation with its commitment to graphic portrayals of aging hippies with weird fetishes and polyamorous lifestyles. Real Sex was the soft-porn equivalent of your dad catching you smoking and making you finish the whole pack.
These days, most so-called “water-cooler” shows, to the extent that they still exist, air on premium streamers, where restrictions wouldn’t seem to apply. And almost all of them seem to aspire to “serious adult drama.” And yet you’d never turn on Succession or Severance expecting explicit nudity. To say that nudity has vanished from premium cable isn’t entirely true— has delivered memorable nude scenes in every season, with a refreshing parity between male and female. , deployed for maximum comedy (it wouldn’t make sense not to see Baby Billy’s dick at least once per season). And of course there was Euphoria, which almost doesn’t count since it was essentially an attempt to scare adults about all the weird sex stuff Gen Z was supposedly doing, Kids-style.
