Nudity on Regular television that has or hasn't surprised you.

Cafe Society
1

Really, just nudity they’ve shown on television at all…that isn’t on one of those premieum stations like HBO or Skinamax or even the IFC.

I’m talking about channels you get just with basic cable and public channels.

There’s been an ever growing list, it seems for many years now.

I remember the year NBC showed Shindler’s List uncut. It didn’t even have commercial breaks. I thought that was a great milestone. Then along came NYPD Blue. With brief butt shots and side breast shots. Of course, the only down side to this was seeing Dennis Franz’s chubby bottom. Still, it was all good. I mean, chubby male bottoms need their time too!
Today there’s all sorts of shows with brief nudity. Nip/Tuck and The Shield have some mild nudity all the time in just about every episode. Nothing all major, mind you. Not anything you can’t see very well without a good TIVO or DVD pausing set…but still there.

And of course, channel 8 has many things like Nova and Masterpiece Theatre that has shown outright nudity.

Discovery and Travel Channel usually are apt to show nudity from tribes in Africa and other remote places, and Discovery Health goes CLOSE to it, but always seems to use the usual bluring patches.
There was once, a few years ago, I remember…a show on TLC (I THINK, although it might have been Discovery Health) That had a bunch of nudists in a row, in a forest, from age 1 to 100…all in a line. And each one was fully nude. THIS surprised me the couple of times I saw the opinion of this show. They showed just about everyone from head to foot…although I can’t, for the life of me, remember the show’s name. It wasn’t a show, really. More like a mini Series on the Human animal or body or something. Anyone remember the name of it and what I’m talking about?
And, not seen by my own eyes only read and heard about, shows like Dr 90210, Chicago Hope and that Stargate letter letter ### show…has had various nudity scenes (although how much was seen, obviously I don’t know).

But the point of this topic was one that REALLY shocked me.

I was watching Easy Rider the other day on AMC, a channel known for censoring things…but when the LSD trip part came on, they didn’t cut out anything I was aware of. Even the dark haired girl stripping out of her clothes in the narrow alleyway got totally nude and, believe me, you could tell and see it, just about everything, and AMC just let it go. Shocked the hell out of me.

So…what shows and instances of nudity have you seen and witnessed on Live TV or regular cable channels or varous shows?

Yeah, I know that in Canada and France and England and other countries where nudity isn’t a big deal, this sort of thing is common on public TV…but in the USA, we seem to be a bit more uptight about it. Dunno why.

2

Gah…so many mistakes and mispellings. Sorry, I didn’t use the spell check or preview. : /

3

Weird. I was going to start a thread about this today! I thought of the full frontal scene on television as I watched Munich today and how odd it was.

I will also nitpick that NYPD Blue came before the TV airing of Schindler’s List! :smiley:

4

Years ago, Nickelodeon used to have an interstitial called “Looking at Each Other,” which showed how children lived in countries other than the United States. In one of these taking place in Africa or somewhere, I recall that there was a brief uncensored shot of a young naked black boy, his penis visible. I’m guessing this falls under what Roger Ebert called “The National Geographic Law” or somesort, where he stated that if the peoples of a certain tribe or people don’t wear clothes usually, their nudity appears uncensored. Still, it was surprising to see on a network for children.

5

The first time I ever saw nudity on television was “Steambath” on PBS. Valerine Perrine in the buff. I just stared, not quite believing what I was seeing on the tube and thanking all above that my parents weren’t home! "D

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The Human Body, with Dr Robert Winston.

7

I was a little surprised by a scene I saw on a now-defunct SF series called “Special Unit 2”, a WB series, a few years ago. There was a scene in a strip bar. The “strippers” were dressed in bras and skimpy thongs. This is pretty much standard practice on TV, except the thongs aren’t so skimpy nowadays. Anyway, what surprised me about the scene in “Special Unit 2” was that the strippers were doing the old “bend over and shake the old thong-clad butt” bit, and instead of shooting such scenes from the side or the front (standard practice on TV) or showing a brief instant and then cutting away, “Special Unit 2” had a couple of shots that were several seconds long, shot directly up the butt, with strippers bending over with their legs spread so much you could see their feminine packages straining against their silkies. That surprised me. It’s so unfair that the show was cancelled, when they were willing to go to such lengths to please their viewers.

8

Years and years ago the Lifetime network shared its cable channel with some medical information network (Lifetime was weekdays and the other network on weekend evenings or something like that.) Imagine my surprise when I was channel-surfing one Sunday evening and came across a program featuring a woman getting a pelvic exam.

For years afterward I didn’t want to see, hear or imagine anything about nudity on TV.

9

I’ve seen full rear nudity on a number of Fox shows, including one reasonably attractive female judge on an episode of Ally McBeal.

10

The first time I saw nudity on regular TV was an episode of Dave Allen at Large. It was a sketch of Dave and woman in a restaurant splitting a wishbone. Dave got the larger half, so he made his wish, and the waitress standing at the table was suddenly naked. The next time I can recall was in the late 80s when the Shaka Zulu mini-series aired. I’d like to point out that it was fairly common in most parts of the world to either go topless or with their breasts exposed. Then the Christian missionaries showed up and changed everything. :mad:

11

I believe that was Dyan Cannon

12

Back when I was in my early teens (early `90s), CBS showed a “60 Minutes” retrospective, which included a segment consisting of nude Europeans in public baths, and a clip of a topless Julie Andrews in S.O.B.. Not only was I surprised at seeing it on network TV, I was surprised that this kind of stuff (along with the occasional utterance of “shit”) was allowed as far back as the 70s, or perhaps even more accepted.

It was also around this time that I discovered that PBS had a lot of nudity to offer. I still distinctly remember Kristin Scott Thomas as a nun who gets naked(!) in “Body & Soul”, and a documentary on porn that was pretty tame compared to its subject, but included plenty of boobs and butts.

Sadly, both institutions have somehow lost the gravitas-license that allowed them to carefully deploy tasteful nudity now and then. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw something on PBS that wasn’t censored as badly as any other network show.

13

One more:

Around the same time, I caught *The Cheyenne Social Club * on a UHF station, and was surprised to see Jimmy Stewart chatting with a woman in a sheer blouse that left very little to the imagination.

14

September 1973, on the CBS Morning News, Sally Quinn said “For those of you who don’t have strong stomachs, you might prefer to listen rather than watch. Some of it is rather graphic.” What was the horror she warned of? A story on breast cancer early detection and mammography. They showed nipple, areola, everything openly on broadcast network news in 1973. Beat that chronologically.

Well, that was in the USA. The month previously, I had been in Montréal and they had movies with full frontal nudity. Remember, this was all before cable. Allez le Québec! :slight_smile:

An old corollary to the old National Geographic tribal nudity rule: Nudes are OK if you medicalize them. As though a woman’s nude body has some awful powerful scary mojo, but put it in the hands of a doctor or medical technician, and their mana is powerful enough to protect us. Doctors have the strongest mana in our society, or they used to until radical feminists like the Boston Women’s Health Collective began encouraging women to learn more about their own bodies, remember Our Bodies, Ourselves?

15

What I find quite amusing is that the footage of the Janet Jackson boobie flash that caused such a debacle in the US has been used in news items here in New Zealand every time the incident has been referred to. :stuck_out_tongue:

16

I swear I remember seeing a male butt shot on some very short-lived show called Bay City Blues about a baseball team and being very surprised by it (and, as a young closet case, grateful to have it).

A random pervy perp on The Practice was ordered by the older woman judge to drop his pants in open court, and the lower half of his buttocks were visible at the bottom of his shirt.

David Boreanaz and James Marsters each got their kit off in episodes of Buffy.

Dominic Purcell was nude for several minutes in the first episode of John Doe. The scene was edited into later episodes and a nude shot appeared every week in the opening credits.

Firefly had Nathan Fillion butt-nekkid in an episode but the show was cancelled before it aired.

17

You know, I watched the half-game show, and had no idea Janet’s booby had flopped out until I signed onto the net after the game.

18

One other bit I can think of is the video for Billy Joel’s Allentown which showed the naked butts of guys showering. According to Pop Up videos, the actors all agreed to do it, figuring that it’d be cut out by MTV. Apparently, the folks at MTV missed it, when they screened it, and nobody ever complained, so they left it in.

19

The first nude scene I ever saw on American network tlevision came around 1984 or 1985.

Lucky me, I got to see Ed Flanders drop his pants and tell Ronny Cox to kiss his naked ass, on “St. Elsewhere.”

20

The extent of the culture shock over Jackson’s breast was hugely misrepresented by the right wing media. IIRC, the FCC got less than 50 letters of protest over it, yet they still proceeded to tighten censorship rules. To put this in perspective, the FCC a couple of years earlier had gotten hundreds of thousands of letters protesting a proposed change they were making that would have allowed media conglomerates even more power to dominate local markets than they already did – the FCC ignored those letters.

It was all a put-up job.