UPDATE: 5 Specific Things TV Banned For Way Longer Than You Think
A reader's comment:
This is from the book The Book of TV Lists by Gabe Essoe (1981, pages 66-68)
The First Four TV Shows to Feature Frontal Nudity
Even more than violence, nudity is the most censored commodity on television. Only rarely has a tv show or special gotten away with it.
1.Steambath
A Hollywood Television Theatre Presentation for PBS, was a 90 minute special originally aired on May 4, 1973, and then repeated in August 1976. Written by Bruce Jay Friedman, the comedy play was set in a New York City steambath and was controversial for: 1.its portrayal of God as a Puerto Rican steambath attendant and 2.the frontal nudity of Valerie Perrine throughout most of the show. There was so much excitement and argument about the presentation that many PBS stations refused to carry it the first time around, but favorable critical reaction far outweighed the negative. Even so, it was over three years before it was ever telecast again.
2.Captains and the Kings
An installment on NBC's Best Sellers (1976-77) was an anthology series made up of several serialized novels. Producer Jo Swerling remembers "We had a lovely young actress named Beverly D'Angelo doing a love scene with Harvey Jason. It was your typical TV shot across her back to Harvey as she lets her negligee drop to the ground and she's standing there naked. Then we did closeups of Harvey, and then of Beverly. And in Beverly's closeup we put in a TV matte on the lens so that our matted field of vision would cut just above the nipple line: that way it was obvious that she was nude but you didn't see the nipple. However, when the show was televised, there were in the new TV sets variances in the field of vision, and half the sets in the country saw more of Beverly than the other half. The following morning we got a panic call from the Broadcast Standards that we had violated the nudity ban and that more people saw Beverly's nipples than didn't. But nobody complained. Nobody but the censors. The upshot was that we were told not to cut it that close in the future.
3.Roots
In January 1977, Roots had the distinction of being the first dramatic program on public television to feature frontal nudity. Specifically, in the African sequences there were numerous scenes clearly showing bare breasted women, nipples and all. The justification was that it was necessary dramatically. NBC head censor, Jerry Stanley, didn't see it that way "It was not necessary to the show, and if it wasn't necessary I have to go one step further and say that it was exploitative. Either way, Roots was a production with not only a lot of class, but a lot of clout. There was no real criticism for the nudity, and it opened a lot of doors as far as network programming boundaries were concerned, not only in content, but in form and theme as well.
4.Gauguin the Savage
The CBS biographical film about the French primitive artist almost didn't make its air date because of the concern of too much frontal nudity. Although CBS told producer Douglas Benton that he could show anything on film that the artist had painted, when the film came in, the censors were shocked at the bare breasts - particularly in one scene on the beach in Tahiti where David Carradine as Gauguin painted his lover. According to a CBS censor: "The Tahitian girl kept swatting flies off her breast and she kept jiggling. Three times. We felt that once was enough to make the point. Three jiggles was being a little lascivious. But when they asked that two of the jiggles be cut, the executive producer, Robert Wood, a former president of CBS-TV, threated to withhold the two and a half hour film. Said Wood "I think Doug and director Fielder Cook handled the nudity with exquisite taste. The real issue wasn't the bare breast anyway. Breasts don't mean anything to the networks. It's the nipples they're worried about." Benton shrugged off the attempted censorship as a commonplace occurrence and the show went on the air intact, three jiggles and all. There was no more said about it. As with Roots, the scene was very 'National Geographic.' Brown skin is okay to show (even under fire) but white skin isn't.
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I have my own personal reason for disliking Roots. I was working on a documentary on how to determine natural hair color at the time that damned miniseries came out and they said the name of my documentary was an obvious attempt to play on the success of the miniseries and my funding was pulled.
This is from the book The Book of TV Lists by Gabe Essoe (1981, pages 66-68)
ReplyDeleteThe First Four TV Shows to Feature Frontal Nudity
Even more than violence, nudity is the most censored commodity on television. Only rarely has a tv show or special gotten away with it.
1.Steambath
A Hollywood Television Theatre Presentation for PBS, was a 90 minute special originally aired on May 4, 1973, and then repeated in August 1976. Written by Bruce Jay Friedman, the comedy play was set in a New York City steambath and was controversial for: 1.its portrayal of God as a Puerto Rican steambath attendant and 2.the frontal nudity of Valerie Perrine throughout most of the show. There was so much excitement and argument about the presentation that many PBS stations refused to carry it the first time around, but favorable critical reaction far outweighed the negative. Even so, it was over three years before it was ever telecast again.
2.Captains and the Kings
An installment on NBC's Best Sellers (1976-77) was an anthology series made up of several serialized novels. Producer Jo Swerling remembers "We had a lovely young actress named Beverly D'Angelo doing a love scene with Harvey Jason. It was your typical TV shot across her back to Harvey as she lets her negligee drop to the ground and she's standing there naked. Then we did closeups of Harvey, and then of Beverly. And in Beverly's closeup we put in a TV matte on the lens so that our matted field of vision would cut just above the nipple line: that way it was obvious that she was nude but you didn't see the nipple. However, when the show was televised, there were in the new TV sets variances in the field of vision, and half the sets in the country saw more of Beverly than the other half. The following morning we got a panic call from the Broadcast Standards that we had violated the nudity ban and that more people saw Beverly's nipples than didn't. But nobody complained. Nobody but the censors. The upshot was that we were told not to cut it that close in the future.
3.Roots
ReplyDeleteIn January 1977, Roots had the distinction of being the first dramatic program on public television to feature frontal nudity. Specifically, in the African sequences there were numerous scenes clearly showing bare breasted women, nipples and all. The justification was that it was necessary dramatically. NBC head censor, Jerry Stanley, didn't see it that way "It was not necessary to the show, and if it wasn't necessary I have to go one step further and say that it was exploitative. Either way, Roots was a production with not only a lot of class, but a lot of clout. There was no real criticism for the nudity, and it opened a lot of doors as far as network programming boundaries were concerned, not only in content, but in form and theme as well.
4.Gauguin the Savage
The CBS biographical film about the French primitive artist almost didn't make its air date because of the concern of too much frontal nudity. Although CBS told producer Douglas Benton that he could show anything on film that the artist had painted, when the film came in, the censors were shocked at the bare breasts - particularly in one scene on the beach in Tahiti where David Carradine as Gauguin painted his lover. According to a CBS censor: "The Tahitian girl kept swatting flies off her breast and she kept jiggling. Three times. We felt that once was enough to make the point. Three jiggles was being a little lascivious. But when they asked that two of the jiggles be cut, the executive producer, Robert Wood, a former president of CBS-TV, threated to withhold the two and a half hour film. Said Wood "I think Doug and director Fielder Cook handled the nudity with exquisite taste. The real issue wasn't the bare breast anyway. Breasts don't mean anything to the networks. It's the nipples they're worried about." Benton shrugged off the attempted censorship as a commonplace occurrence and the show went on the air intact, three jiggles and all. There was no more said about it. As with Roots, the scene was very 'National Geographic.' Brown skin is okay to show (even under fire) but white skin isn't.
---------------------------------------------
I have my own personal reason for disliking Roots. I was working on a documentary on how to determine natural hair color at the time that damned miniseries came out and they said the name of my documentary was an obvious attempt to play on the success of the miniseries and my funding was pulled.