Back before the internet, I got my prurient interests satisfied by late-night uncut foreign movies on WNET, the NY PBS station. Oh, how I loved the French.
I recently saw a documentary on a non-premium channel on a tribe (I think in South America) that showed full frontal nudity of pre-teens that I’m sure I could be arrested for if I had captured a still or taped it.
There’s quite a bit of partial nudity in Nip/Tuck. Julian’s half-ass is always a pleasant surprise.
In the first episode of the Tremors TV series, Gladys Jimenez as Rosalita, is not wearing a bra. She hides out at one point by ducking into a water trough and spends the next ten minutes bounding around in a wet T-shirt. 
Nobody has mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s season 6 episode “Smashed” in which Spike and Buffy have very passionate and obvious sex with only Buffy’s long leather skirt covering the action. What a scene that was! Also, a late season 7 episode “Touched” had some steamy action between Willow and Kennedy that was quite surprising for prime time television.
I can still close my eyes and remember the first Lady Heather episode of CSI:Original Flavor which featured a lovingly shot autopsy scene of a naked woman, showing basically everything, thus revealing the apparent loophole in the prime-time nudity rule: it’s okay so long as the actress is playing a dead person. The rest of the episode was pretty enjoyable too…
Ethnographic nudity apparently has always been OK. National Geographic has been showing naked natives since the 1910s. A 1933 MGM feature about Eskimos had several scenes of bare-breasted women, including at least one closeup of a mother breast-feeding her child.
Picturing naked teens is not illegal in itself; pictures of pre-teens that are prurient or emphasize sexuality are.
Replying to Otto
Yep, guess I did NOT read the FOP :smack:
Geez, looked at all of those except #1.
Well at least I was able to offer the Lucy Lawless “moment”.
Do the Discovery Channel, TLC, and (to a lesser extent) PBS count?
I know for a fact that the former two have run specials on human reproduction, sexuality, etc. etc. that were MORE than a little revealing…like a “Cervix-cam.” :eek:
Learning is fun.
E! Channel gets into nudity fairly often. They’re thong-friendly. Here’s a link to a shot from one of their “Wild-On” segments: TV Got Back! Go to the first site on the Google Search. The image is definitely not work-friendly, though it’s not really naked as there’s a thong. But tell me it doesn’t LOOK naked!
Well, when you’re playing football, for one.
I had heard about Dave Garroway’s zipper before, but it could just be UL. Anyway, looking for a reference to it, I found this other MB, which has a few other mentions:
In the silent film, Orphans of the Storm, there are several scenes of female nudity. Before the Hays Office, such things were not automatically banned, and directors would show things like Roman orgies with topless women, feeling that it was appropriate in context.
There’s also Zulu, which starts out with a mass wedding ceremony of dozens of topless African women. AFAIK, there was little outburst over this when the film was released.
Wow, guess you’re all in the USA, huh?
Here in the UK, nudity on TV is no big deal whatsoever. Big Brother, Ibiza Uncovered, etc etc etc. Not that the kind of flesh on show in these programmes does a lot for me.
Heh, what was that about “British reserve?” 
I’ve got a good story. It was sometime in the late 80’s. I was about 13 or 14, and I was watching tv on a Sunday afternoon. My parents were out somewhere. As I pass the A&E Channel, I find a movie that looks like a WW2 film. “This will do,” I think to myself. I check the TV Guide and find out that it’s called Slaughterhouse Five.
After a few minutes the war scene ends, and we switch to a scene of a guy in some kind of room high above the earth. He’s talking with disembodied voices who are apparently aliens.
Suddenly, a big bubble enters the room and deposits a dog in there with the guy. Another bubble then enters the room, but this one contains a woman. A stark naked woman! I think my reaction was something like this: :eek: → 
I immediately alerted the appropriate authority figure (ie, my older brother) and the two of us are treated to a rather raunchy sex scene where the naked chick crawls across the room on her hands and knees, and then crawls on top of the man. At this point, the camera pans back and slowly fades out. Just as the screen goes black, the aliens ask, in a totally deadpan monotone, “Doctor, are you mating now?” We just about died laughing.
We eventually told our parents about it. About 10 years later
The rule was that “Nudity above the waist is OK below the equator.”
Not even then, in Otto’s world, I suspect.
Gary Burghoff dropped a towel so we could all see his butt on an early episode of MAS*H. The story was a sniper was shooting up the compound. Radar was caught coming out of the shower, ran around a little, then headed back to the shower. The towel fell off as he was going back into the shower. His butt was visible for only a few frames.
PBS was always good for some unexpected nudity, as in their adaptations of I, Claudius or Candide. So i was surprised when I moved to Utah and found that KBYU, broadcast from Brigham Young University (a Church School) actually cut foreign films like Diva, and even brief nudity from Sherlock Holmes.
It therefore surprised the heck out of me when they broadcast Shaka Zulu completely uncut on commercial TV in SLC. It was late at night, but still – late night programming starts at 10:30, not 11:30 in the Intermountain West.
Just one breast, and she gamely kept on singing while she…adjusted. Speaking of Xena, there’s a couple nipple shots on the show that escaped censor notice.
On Stargate SG1 there’s a very obvious nipple shot of a pre-teen that makes me cringe, even though it’s a medical scene (doing the whole “Clear!” thing).
While the scenes DWMarch mentioned contain no actual nudity, “Smashed” and “Touched” contain the most blatant sex acts I’ve ever seen on TV that isn’t actual porn.
Yes, I’m an American, nipples are shocking! :eek: