Did you ever get surprised by a flash of nudity on TV, other than premium cable TV like Skinamax or HBO, etc., where nudity shoud come as no surprise?
I’m not talking about ballyhooed nudity like the one on NYPD Blue: “In a few weeks, we shall see Sipowicz’s butt!!!”
I’m talkng surprise bits, like Janet Jackson’s tit.
The one I remember was a UPN SciFi series about a secret Chicago cop force that dealt with supernatural entities. They had a scene in a strip club. The strippers all wore thongs, of course, but they were very SKIMPY thongs, and the strippers were waggling their pretty-much-naked butts at the camera, and the camera didn’t flinch. Surprised me, considering it was a prime-time network TV show.
There was some TV show a couple decades ago on one of the networks about a baseball team and I swear there was male rear nudity although no one else I knew who watched it noticed. I can’t remember anything about the show, not the name, not anyone who starred in it, not what network it was on, nothing. It only lasted a few episodes. I think it may have been created by one of the big-name producers of the time, Canell or Bochco. Anyways, it was startling to me.
Would the 6 o’ clock news on WCVB Boston count? Back in the mid-80’s they learned the hard way that if you’re going to do locker room interviews (Red Sox, in this case), don’t do them next to the entrance to the showers.
Several years ago, on USA network, they had a show I rather liked, called “Reel Wild Cinema.” It featured clips from godawful old movies, condensed versions of particularly godawful old movies, and interviews with B-movie directors and performers. Loads of fun for bad movie lovers. Among their guests were Russ Meyer, Adrienne Barbeau, June Wilkinson, and Dave Friedman.
The show was hosted by Sandra Bernhardt.
One evening, the show was particularly interesting, so I didn’t pay much attention to Bernhardt… but after the half-hour station break, I noticed that something seemed to be different about her. I shrugged, and forgot about it.
I’d taped the episode, though, and when I went back and watched it again later, I realized what it was. She was wearing a sheer blouse, through which her nipples were clearly visible. After the station break, she’d put on a bra under the shirt… but for the first half of the show, it was showtime, if you know what I mean.
I’ve often wondered howthehell she got away with that. Didn’t anyone on set notice?
The Outer Limits (the 90s series) had two bits of raunch (or at least a bit of nekkidness)
The episode where a disabled inventor creates a “fully functional” android servant and the other where an alien possesses a college student and makes her bonk furiously till she finds someone she loves.
In the UK it was a pleasant post watershed surprise, considering the college student was Allyssa Milano
While the hostesses is showing a contestant to his seat, one of her tits falls out of her loose fitting top. She straightens things up and continues as if nothing had happened.
I checked a tape of this incident several times to be sure.
Sometime in the early 80’s…Sunday afternoon… KTVU Channel 2 out of San Francisco showed, unedited, Prime Cut a 1972 Lee Marvin vehicle with a whole lotta nude Sissy Spacek. As a 12-13 year-old who just got his own TV in his room…hell, I felt like I won the lottery.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s, it was fashionable for women to go braless. Thus, many TV shows were filled with dancing headlights. Charlie’s Angels and the Love Boat come to mind. Lauren Tewes on Love Boat could always be counted on to wear some thin, form-fitting shirt that would not just show her nipples, but often the detailed outline of her breasts.
As a teenage boy then, I felt this was a great thing.
And of course, there was Valerie Bertinelli’s constant camel-toe on One Day at a Time…
A few years ago I was switching around the channels and came across a movie with Tom Barringer. It was some sort of prison movie where he was a prisoner. Anyway, I’m watching for a few minutes and then there’s a shower scene with nude men in the background. All you could see were their butts, but this was a Saturday afternoon. I remember thinking it was pretty strange to show that in the middle of the day. They soon switched to a commercial, and when they came back, they had something completely different on. Like a rerun of Cheers.
When I was in Alabama a few years ago the local network affiliated opted to cut the couldn’t-be-less-sexual nudity from SCHINDLER’S LIST (no small feat considering the entire scene of men and women running around naked) and wouldn’t show the coming-out-episode of ELLEN, but then aired the BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS on late-night and evidently forgot to digitally blur or otherwise disengage the male nudity in the shower scene (we’re gonna romp…and stomp… and a whoop it up to-nighttttt!). So I guess the moral was that it’s fine to be nekkid in a shower if you’re tight bunned football players looking forward to a trip to the whorehouse, but not if you’re Jews about to be murdered, which there is some sort of logic to I suppose.
Is IFC a premium channel? I thought they were just normal cable, but the other day they were showing Trainspotting and I tuned in just at the toilet-diving sequence. That was pretty raunchy.
Before Soderberg’s Oscar winning Traffic there was a British 6 part tele-drama *Traffik *(it was the same story really). Anyway, it aired on PBS and there was a part when the drug dealer’s wife was stripped searched in an Airport.
This was PBS [maybe about 1996-ish?] and you could see it “all”, not just headlights, for about a minute of screen time. Quite an eye-opening surprise.
Well I guess someone had to post an obligatory mention of Janet Jackson’s right breast during the 2004 Superbowl Half-Time show.
Remember some years ago, Lucy Lawless (of “Xena” fame) had her breasts pop out while she was singing the national anthem at a hockey game? http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=265
When the epic mini-series Shaka Zulu debuted on TV in Atlnata, with all that glorious T&A. Just the right time in the 80s I guess – the nudity wouldn’t have been shown earlier for prudishness and not later because of the frankly, un PC nature of showing bare breasted black women immodestly running around.
