When there’s a scene whee the character is naked there’s 2 general ways that can be accomplished: i)just show the actor naked, don’t worry about revealing too much or camera angles or ii) use creative camera angles to give the impression of nudity while revealing nothing. What I wonder about is when the same season of the show does both techniques with the same actor. I’ve seen this several times, the 2 that come to mind are Kate Nash in GLOW and Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvellous Ms Maisel but I’ve definitely seen it more. In those cases the actors show nudity in one episode then default back to camera tricks for the rest of the season.
If it was season to season you’d think either the actor or the show had changed their tack, but the change within a season seems odd.
Actors’ contracts often require a bonus (sometimes substantial) for nudity, or disallow it altogether. It could be that the producers did not want to pay for multiple episodes with nudity, or the actor re-negotiated partway through the season and no longer wanted to do nudity, or some combination of factors.
Yep, in most cases, you’ve got to pay a lot for every second of nudity, so it needs to be rationed.
Another interesting factor is when pilot episodes allow for a lot more risqué material, but the subsequent episodes get a tamer rating. The pilot for Stargate had female nudity, the pilot for The O.C. had characters using drugs and so on…
Nudity can also be shown to make a scene more shocking. In The Crying Game, the shot of Jaye Davidson’s dick was to shock the audience as much as it was to Stephen Rea’s character. After the reveal, any other nudity doesn’t matter.
TV series are often edited for time and for content when they are sold for syndication. The explicit scene might be one that can easily be cut without confusing the audience. The coy scene might be more important for the plot.
Stargate SG-1 was on Showtime for its first five seasons, before moving to Sci-Fi Channel, so the nudity in the first episode may well have been a case of “because we can.” IIRC, there was little to no nudity after that, and I suspect that that was, in part, so that they didn’t have to re-edit the episodes to take out the nudity for syndication – during its Showtime run, it was also being run in syndication, with a lag of a few months.
I think this is because they did not know that BBC America was going to air it in the US. I think BBC America does not do nudity and they made the rest of the show with that in mind.
The pilot was most likely made well before the rest of the first season.
If “full backal” means posterior, but no breasts or genitals, then plenty of USA cable channels (including, I think, BBC America) would show that. Heck, network channels show it after 10:00.
Except that in a few other episodes, there were male characters going full backal (yes, that is a term), but that might go to the widespread “showing female butts is sexy, showing male butts is funny” dichotomy.
NYPD Blue got in trouble over this, because tho it was on after 10 in normal areas, in central it was on at 9. Plenty of backal there, and not just Dennis Franz’s hairy ass…