Amid all the discussions of nudity on Girls , one key point has been left out: There isn’t actually that much of it. I crunched the numbers to find out exactly how much exposed skin there really is on the controversial HBO comedy.
HBO
Over the past few days, the subject of Girls' "excessive" nudity has popped up again, thanks to a tactless question asked by a reporter at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. It's hardly the first time critics have called out the nudity on Lena Dunham's HBO series — and it certainly won't be the last. But once again, I'm forced to wonder why there's this much conversation about it. Yes, there is nudity on Girls, but it's hardly excessive. In fact, I'd say the show is, by and large, less explicit than True Blood or Game of Thrones, which also air on HBO.
To prove this, I decided to go through the first two seasons of the series and document every second of nudity. My methodology was fairly simple. In order for a something to count as nudity, it had to be actual and not implied nudity — there is, to be fair, plenty of the latter, but it's mostly no more extreme than what you'd see on basic cable. I was actually generous in my counting: For example, sex scenes were sometimes counted entirely, even when there were moments without nudity. (It would simply have been too tedious to count otherwise.) I even counted the grey area: a character's bare ass while on the toilet, and all of Hannah's scenes in the notorious yellow mesh top sans undergarment. It's worth noting that the latter, which hardly counts as nudity, greatly contributed to the total.
In the end, I determined that throughout the first two seasons of Girls, nudity occurred 3% of the time. Compared to network shows, yes, that's a significant amount, but in the grand scheme of things, note how little time is actually spent on Girls showing its characters naked. For all the talk about constant nudity on the show, you'd think that it would take up more than 3% of the screen time.
No comments:
Post a Comment