TV Nudity News

Mr. Skin Hall-of-Famer and avowed muff-diver Amber Heard, who has done great nudity in Friday Night Lights, Alpha Dog, The Informers, and The Joneses, is set to star in the upcoming network series pilot Playboy.

Picked up by NBC early last month, Playboy will be an hour-long drama set in the 1960s heyday of Playboy clubs that popped up in Chicago, New York, and other major cities around the country.

Frankly (and spankly) it sounds a lot like the 1985 TV movie A Bunny's Tale, starring Kirstie Alley and based on the experiences of 70s feminist icon and professional ball-buster Gloria Steinem.

This is all well and good, but it's time for Amber to return to the more skin-permissive medium of R-rated movies and explore her newfound taste for tuna tacos on the big screen.

Heard is still the word!

What was Lucy Lawless's character on Spartacus like before she became a manipulative Real Housewife of Ancient Rome? Did she always enjoy measuring the swords of her gladiators and having her naked knockers soaped up by equally naked and nubile female slaves? Did she still like to get topless?

All these questions and more were answered this past weekend in first episode of the Starz prequel Spartacus: Gods of the Arena. The new series precedes the action of Blood and Sand, which means it will give us a chance to see lots more of Lucy Lawless, whose character died at the end of the last season.

In the first episode, we got to see Lucy's knockers as she bangs her husband, then again in an opium-fueled Sapphic skinterlude with naked Jaime Murray. And as a bone-us, Marisa Ramirez shows both boobs and butt having slave sex with her husband in a jail cell.

Lucy discussed the pros of tracing her character's descent down the path of naked debauchery in a recent interview: "From an acting point of view [it's] such a rare privilege to go back and revisit the characters before they became sex-craved schemers. When they were full of hope, innocence and potential. You watch them degrade themselves through bad choices. It's fascinating."

Fascinating with a capital "ass."

Emmy Rossum, star of the new Showtime series Shameless, recently told The Vegas Times how much she likes to get naked on the boob tube.

The actress, best known until recently for her operatic roles and powerful singing voice, is quickly gaining a reputation for her skinthusiastic willingness to show off her T&A on the small screen in wild uninhibited sex scenes.

"It doesn't make sense that the character would wear a bra and care at all about what she looks like when she's having sex," Emmy explains. "Sex is meant to feel good, and she wants to feel good. Her life is so shitty in so many ways. Some people use alcohol, some people use gambling -- and some people use sex."

Her costar Justin Chatwin isn't complaining either. He previously starred with Emmy in Dragonball Z and now gets the chance to do some dragonballing of his own with the young skingenue.

Emmy says it best: "It's like, OK, time to take my top off."

This year, after three straight years of being handed Golden Globes in hopes that January Jones and Christina Hendricks would finally get the message and do a lesbian scene, or at least prove that Christina's luscious melons aren't themselves the products of Madison Avenue ad wizards, the run is over for AMC's Mad Men.

Show business people will tell you that being denied a Golden Globe is a humiliation second only to having your movie premiere switched from New York and Los Angeles to Sofia, Bulgaria, where it was filmed.

But that's what happened to Mad Men this year when the show's obstinate refusal to even let a nip slip or flash some ass and roll the dice on an FCC fine finally caught up to it.

John Hamm and his buddies went home defeated and empty-handed when nude kid on the block Boardwalk Empire took the Best TV Show award like candy from a baby, proving that the best way to spice up a period drama is nudity. Period.

If AMC can't figure out why HBO ruled and they drooled at the Golden Globes last night, then here it is. HBO gave us what they couldn't with Boardwalk Empire: nonstop nudity, lesbian sex scenes, and a fully frontal (and frontally full-furred) Paz de la Huerta.

Wrap it up, we'll take it.

Game of Thrones, the new HBO fantasy series set to premiere April 17, is going to be "beyond R" in the ratings department, according to the show's producer David Benioff.

Benioff, who wrote the screenplay for the 2004 mythological epic Troy with a naked Diane Kruger, is taking full advantage of HBO's skinthusiasm for the female body as represented in shows like The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire.

The series, which features 300 star Lena Heady, is based on the award-winning series of epic fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin called A Song of Ice and Fire. And Benioff is going to make sure that all the dirty parts make it to the screen. Hopefully some of them will include Lena!

"Here, because we have ten hours to tell the story, we're able to include all the major characters... and we're able to do it the way George does it in the books in terms of the darkness of it and the violence of it and the sexuality of it, which a major studio would never let you do, even if you're lucky enough to get an R rating," Benioff told Access Hollywood. "George's world is a violent world - there's a lot of killing and bloodshed and eviscerations and decapitations and there's a lot of sex. It's one of the things that I loved about these books."

Game of Thrones sounds like something you would play with yourself.

Charlotte Ross's most recent TV role is that of a MILFtastic mom on the FOX megahit Glee, but back in the early 2000s, Charlotte was burning out VCR motors as the skin-flashing Detective Connie McDowell on ABC's gritty cop drama NYPD Blue.

On the deservedly skinfamous 2003 episode "Nude Awakening," Charlotte made history by baring butt and partial boobage on screen. Five years later in January 2008, the FCC announced that they would seek a $1.4 million fine against ABC for the scene, one of the largest TV fines in history.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but even judges can't deny the power of Charlotte's Grade-A seat-meat. This Tuesday the Second Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the fine because it "turn[ed] on an application of the same context-based indecency test" that the courts found too vague in the case of Cher's uttering of the word "fuck" on the Billboard Music Awards in 2002.

Next up, full frontal nudity on Desperate Housewives.

In 2009, the Skin Lab technicians spent hours watching and re-watching Sandra Bullock's much-hyped "nude scene" with Ryan Reynolds in the romantic comedy The Proposal and all they found was the briefest hint of bare butt.

This year, the prick-teasing chick-flick is back in style. The 2011 version is called No Strings Attached and stars one-skin-wonder Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher. The recently released red band trailer, which allows all the cursing the regular one leaves out, paints a sorry picture indeed. When given the chance to show naked body parts, the producer's chose to use Ashton's ass.

It's too soon to call, and we'll be analyzing every frame that comes out before the movie's release to be sure, but the chances of seeing Natalie naked in this movie just went from zero (before the red band trailer) to some incalculable negative (sk)integer. Stay tuned for updates.

NBC's Heroes and ABC's Lost, two sci-fi dramas that ended their runs in 2010, are the TV shows with the most illegal downloads in 2010, according to TorrentFreak.com.

Lost went off the air after wrapping up its sprawling, enigmatic storyline while Heroes was cancelled due to poor ratings. Ironically, Heroes, like the third most-pirated show, Showtime's skin-filled crime drama Dexter, was downloaded by more people who watched it according to the Nielsen ratings. If NBC had been counting illegal downloads instead of legitimate TV viewers, Heroes may still be on the air.

But the question of why so many people downloaded episodes of Heroes and Lost is easy to answer with one look at MrSkin.com.

Heroes boasted some of the hottest babes of the 2000's, like twice-nude Ali Larter and sexy but sadly skinless Kristen Bell and Hayden Panettiere. Lost had more island-stranded beauties than plot twists, including Evangeline Lilly, Maggie Grace, Yoon-jin Kim, Elizabeth Mitchell, Sonya Walger, and Bai Ling.

But why bother with an illegal download when you can see every one of these actresses nude or sexy at MrSkin.com without risking prosecution by the FBI?