I think Laugh-In was by far and away the trailblazer. Yes, Love American Style was a lot of love and a lot of skimpily clad girls, but Laugh-In set the bar. At the time I thought the best job in the world would be the guy who got to paint words on bikini-wearing Judy Carne and Goldie Hawn.
There was that episode of Medical Center where a man has a sex change, complete with being seen at the end dressed as a woman.
I was in elementary school at the time and there was a school yard buzz about it. Lots of parents didn’t allow their kids to watch.
The actor playing the guy was “Mr. Brady” from the Brady Bunch, Robert Reed.
I think this might have been 1970, though, not the 60’s.
Not much of a surprise, really… :rolleyes:
***Medical Center ***debuted in 1969, following CBS’s rural purge. Everything then had to be “now” and “relevant.”
Even as a teenager, I found Love American Style to be sophomoric in the extreme. *** Laugh-In ***was just moronic.
Medical Center did a lot of those kind of controversial subjects, but mostly during the 70s.
Homosexuality, VD, impotence, sex changes, race relations, drugs - sort of the Pit with stethoscopes.
Regards,
Shodan
Not related to the topic of the thread but this reminds me of a story. I read how some guy wrote to the studio asking them about the automatic doors on the show. He wanted to install automatic doors in a building he was designing but the technology he found that was available was fairly primitive. It just sensed when somebody was standing within a certain distance of the door and opened, even if somebody was just walking by the door or standing near it. But he noticed how the doors on Star Trek only opened when somebody was going in or out of the room. So he asked what kind of technology they were using.
Somebody at the studio wrote back to him and said they didn’t think he could use their “technology”. They just put two stagehands off camera and had them manually pull the door open when it was appropriate for the scene.
The Bob Cummings Show (1955-1959) was about a horn-dog photographer who was always trying to get into his models’ panties. The episode I saw was the most risqué black-and-white TV show I’ve ever seen.
Paul Lynde, who was on Bewitched, Hollywood Squares, and a frequent guest on talk shows in the 1960s and 1970s always pushed the envelope (for that time anyway). Most of his one-liners were double entendres, and he also was fairly openly gay by the standards of the time.
Speaking of game shows, the 1970s version of Match Game had a lot of racy stuff. I don’t remember enough of the 1960s version to say if they also had that sort of thing.
Anyone recall for sure?
I didn’t watch the original (I was pretty young), but if Wikipedia is correct, the original wasn’t risque at all, until they had received word that they’d been cancelled. They started doing double-entendre questions (because it amused them, and because they weren’t afraid of the network, since they had already been cancelled), their ratings went up, and they got “un-cancelled,” and then ran for a number of years, before getting cancelled again when NBC dumped a bunch of game shows.
When the show was revived on CBS in '73, they had, once again, started with tame questions, before quickly returning to the risque ones that the show is now remembered for.
Not the sixties, but there was a Bugs Bunny where he went to the Three Bears’ house. He sweet talked Mama Bear to keep from being mauled, and she was smitten. She appeared everywhere he went, once wearing a see-through nightie.
Leave It to Beaver
S3:E38 the last day of school - Beaver wants to impress his teacher. Not content with the usual bribe of an Apple, he buys her lingerie.
S3:E32 Beaver and Violet - beaver’s parents are trying to encourage him to like girls. So they pick up Violet out on the street one day and make Beaver let her sit on his lap
S4:E2 Beaver’s House Guest - Divorce
An episode of LItB I remember well is the one where Ward and June invite Miss Landers over for dinner and she shows up in what was back then considered a modest casual outfit but was still pretty revealing. The camera kept switching from her bare shoulders to her open-toed high heels, while Beaver squirmed in the chair he was sitting in. When June asked if he’d like to escort her into the dining room, he looked up and said “But mom, she ain’t got no clothes on!”
I must have been nine or ten at the time, and I gotta admit I was pretty turned on too. Sue Randall was really hot! 
Star Trek was known for sheer costumes in some episodes. They were pushing the limits for family tv in 1966.
Sherry Jackson from Danny Thomas Show played a sexy android in Trek.
I watched it every afternoon when I was home in fifth and sixth grades, and I can confirm it was pretty straight laced, as were all game shows of the period.
The only “risque” moment I can think of came on Eye Guess, which was hosted by Bill Cullen. One of the contestants was Dolly Read, a Playboy Playmate with a charming English accent. When Bill asked what she did for a living, she said “I’m a Playboy bunny.” He replied with “I see,” followed by “Here are the answers, dear” as he handed the cards over to her.
Dolly would go on to marry Dick Martin of Laugh-In fame. (I knew her well from sneaking looks at my dad’s Playboy collection.)
The only episode ever aired is now on YouTube, I can’t seem to post the link, but it’s searchable.
According to Stephen Whitfield in The Making of Star Trek:
Wherever possible, [Designer Bill Theiss] will create a costume that at least appears to be revealing. A limiting factor, of course, is imposed by NBC’s Broadcast Standards Department. As is the case with dialogue, there are some things that are flatly forbidden. For example, you are not allowed to show the underside of the breast. You can bare the top of the breast almost down to the nipple, just so the nipple doesn’t show. Underneath, however, is verboten. (Perhaps the censors are afraid moss grows there.)
The navel is also taboo … you are not supposed to show it or call undue attention to it.
When Roddenberry produced Genesis II (a show that really should have been picked up) in the early '70s, it featured a race of mutants with double circulatory systems. This allowed two navels to be attached to Mariette Hartley, in revenge for the earlier prohibition on belly buttons. (Broadcast Standards had also relaxed considerably by then.)
There’s an old joke that Petticoat Junction was the dirtiest show ever on TV, because they took three beautiful teenage girls, put them in a town called Hooterville and got it past the censors for seven seasons.
… At a “Shady Rest” hotel run by a madam named “Kate” and an “Uncle Joe,” where tired businessmen can “relax” far away from home.
The girls changed, but their “names” stayed the same. 
In the one and only episode of Honey West I remember, Honey (Anne Francis) was forced to chase after the bad guy wearing only a tight-fitting raincoat. At the end, she told Sam (John Ericson) “I need to go back” to wherever it was she had left her clothes, since “I forgot something.”
My mother would have been outraged if she had noticed my reaction to that sequence. 
Batman regularly had hot women in tight-fitting or otherwise revealing outfits, but Julie Newmar outdid them all as Catwoman in “The Purr-fect Crime,” cracking her whip, brandishing her cat-o-nine tails, and asking Leo (Jock Mahoney) if he remembered to brush her pussy willows that morning.
Holy dominatrix, Batman! 