Get ready to see Anthony Anderson, Taye Diggs, Chris Jones, Tyler Posey, Bruno Tonioli, and James Van Der Beek bare more of themselves than they’ve ever bared on TV. The six celebs have volunteered to strip butt naked — for a good cause! — on Fox’s The Real Full Monty on Monday (December 9) night, starting at 8/7c.
Although we’re not expecting anything too explicit from that two-hour special, broadcast TV has certainly shown a lot of skin before — especially on the ABC cop drama NYPD Blue. “Frontal nudity was off the table. But I wanted to have adults in realistic sexual situations,” co-creator Steven Bochco told GQ in 2014. “You had to see breasts from the side. You had to see a**es. There was no discussion of male tush versus female tush. It was generic tush.”
After NYPD Blue went off the air, though, the broadcast networks hiked up their britches. “It’s one of the enduring surprises to me that [nudity] pretty much stopped there for network TV,” Bochco said. “Once we were a hit, I thought it would really open a door. Instead, all of the subsequent breakthroughs came on cable. Of network TV’s many failures, that’s one.”
Perhaps Bochco, then, will think The Real Full Monty is a step in the right direction. Below, get an eyeful of big moments in broadcast TV nudity from the past half of a century.
1973: M*A*S*H
M*A*S*H showed a glimpse of Gary Burghoff’s bare backside in the episode “The Sniper,” as Radar runs from a shower. “We did not show the briefest of flashes of Radar’s behind because we thought it was what viewers were dying to see, but because we thought the idea was funny,” executive producer Larry Gelbart later told fans.
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy: Everett Collection
1973: Steambath
That same year, in a PBS adaptation of a Bruce Jay Friedman play, Valerie Perrine became the first female actor to go nude on American television, according to IndieWire.
1974: 46th Academy Awards
Streaker Robert Opel ran nude across the Oscars stage in 1974, interrupting host David Niven’s introduction of Elizabeth Taylor. “That’s a pretty hard act to follow,” Taylor quipped when she reached the podium.
1975: The Incredible Machine
The National Geographic special The Incredible Machine features a shot of a woman posing nude for an art class. That special, on an unrelated note, ranked as PBS’s highest-rated program until 1982, according to The New York Times.
1977: I, Claudius
Two years later, PBS viewers saw a Masterpiece Theatre airing of the BBC miniseries I, Claudius — which featured, as the Times put it at the time, “several seduction scenes, instances of toplessness, the peregrinations of nymphomaniac, and moments of homosexual love-play.”
Everett Collection
1977: Roots
When the landmark miniseries Roots aired on ABC in 1977, some viewers complained about the depictions of partial nudity, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Still, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) didn’t quibble, per ThoughtCo.
1988 (and onward): The Simpsons
The Simpsons has featured nudity — often Bart mooning other Springfield residents — since the Fox show’s days as a Tracey Ullman Show segment. (If you’re curious, the fan-run Wikisimpsons has dozens if not hundreds of examples.)
1997: Schindler’s List
In 1997, NBC aired a mostly uncensored version of Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning 1993 film about the Holocaust. “There are no punches pulled here,” said Marvin Levy, a spokesperson for the director at Amblin Entertainment, said at the time, per The Washington Post. “Oskar Schindler was a womanizer; it’s part of his character. You will see [sexual] nudity, you’ll see the nudity in the camps. And you can’t touch any of that.”
1994: NYPD Blue
Actors David Caruso, Dennis Franz, and Jimmy Smits all showed their butts on NYPD Blue, as Slate reported in 2005, and in 2008, the FCC fined ABC $1.4 million for a seven-second nude scene featuring Charlotte Ross. The U.S. Court of Appeals struck down that indecency fine in 2011.
ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images
1999: Once and Again
As Once and Again filled NYPD Blue’s spot on ABC’s schedule in 1999, one scene from the family drama featured a nude rear view of cast member Billy Campbell. “Our compliments to Campbell’s personal trainer for helping sculpt a butt that will have viewers used to nudity in this time slot saying, ‘Jimmy Who?’” the New York Post said at the time.
2004: The Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show
We owe the term “wardrobe malfunction” to the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl, when Justin Timberlake ripped off a piece of Janet Jackson’s costume, revealing her left breast. In the ensuing “Nipplegate” controversy, the FCC tried to fine CBS $550,000 for indecency, but the federal appeals court threw out the case in 2008, according to the Associated Press.
2024: The Real Full Monty
Broadcast TV has ceded onscreen nudity to cable and streaming in the last two decades, but now we have six gents baring it all to raise awareness for prostate, testicular, and colorectal cancer testing and research in The Real Full Monty. (We’re expecting a lot of pixelation, of course.)
The Real Full Monty, Special Premiere, Monday, December 9, 8/7c, Fox