The New Boob Tube

Game of Thrones, which kicks off its final season on HBO this spring, redefined the TV sex scene. Sex and nudity on television aren’t going anywhere—but they will need to evolve.

- Eric Spitznagel

When Game of Thrones debuts its eighth and final season on April 14, one thing will be glaringly apparent to longtime fans: There aren’t nearly as many naked prostitutes in Westeros anymore.

This is particularly disappointing to Samantha Bentley, who has played three different ladies of the night over several seasons of HBO’s 47-time Emmy-winning series. “I was hoping maybe they’d have me back one more time before it ends,” she says wistfully. “But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. It’s a different show now.”

By “different,” she means, of course, less nude. Exposed flesh on Game of Thrones has dropped by a staggering 81.8 percent from season one to season seven. This is a pretty dramatic shift for a show that actor Ian McShane, a one-time guest star, once dismissed as “just tits and dragons.”

Game of Thrones isn’t a pioneer in gratuitous nudity on mainstream TV. Naked body parts have been slowly but surely sneaking onto American television since Dennis Franz flashed his butt on ABC’s NYPD Blue in 1994. But it’s the first critically acclaimed series to put nudity front and center. The show was once so enthusiastic about rampant nakedness that it inspired new terminology — including sexposition, a word coined by TV critic Myles McNutt to explain how Game of Thrones uses random unclothed bodies as window dressing for plot exposition.