Hits And Misses In The Nudity Debate

Hit & Miss bares some interesting questions about nudity on television, argues The Guardian's Mark Lawson. Nudity on screen can often seem unnecessary or gratuitous – but Sky Atlantic's new drama suggests this isn't always the case. A drama producer who has worked in both television and radio once said that the great benefit of working on the wireless was that there was never any hassle from actors or audiences over nude scenes. Apart from strong language, nakedness is the most frequent complaint in TV feedback forums and, in both cases, the objection is that these elements are unnecessary or gratuitous. The difference is that whereas opinions on language are largely generational – the more recent the viewer's birth-date, the less likely they are to be offended by swearing – objections to nudity are more widely shared because of changing attitudes to women on screen, often influenced by feminism.

In this context, one of the striking aspects of new Sky Atlantic drama Hit & Miss, Paul Abbott and Sean Conway's compelling drama about a transgender assassin played by Chloe Sevigny, is that it contains a moment that attempts to make the case for a full-frontal nude scene that is dramatically crucial and completely non-gratuitous.


Sevigny's character Mia, who is undergoing hormone treatment prior to the final transformative operation, stands naked in front of a mirror. The unusual complexity of this image is that the viewer is seeing male and female nakedness simultaneously, being shown genuine breasts and a prosthetic penis.

It might possibly be objected that this scene is prurient – offering up a transgender patient as a sort of freak-show – but Mia is explicitly a character tracking the transformations of her body and it is relevant to the narrative for the audience to know what she has under her clothes at this stage: the information pays off in later scenes when her long-lost son surprises her in the bath and a local lothario tries to grope her between the legs. Abbott and Conway are surely right – and Sevigny seems to have agreed – that the reveal was necessary.

Most dramas, though, can't claim such an easy absolution. In British cop shows of the 1970s and '80s, it sometimes seemed almost obligatory for the central detective to be interrupted during love-making by a call-out to a crime-scene. As he heaved discreetly out of bed – often conveniently wearing boxers or even trousers – his big-busted girfriend would walk, in the foreground of the shot, naked past him to the bathroom. Lawson's memory suggests that The Sweeney was a particular offender.

Greater sensitivity to the exploitation of women has reduced the popularity of such shots, although one contributor to the Guardian's letters page reported that he had stopped watching Homeland after episode four because of the frequent female nudity. The correspondent found these shots of women's bodies "misogynistic" and accused reviewers who admired the series of either ignoring or privately revelling in this woman-hating parade of flesh.

Lawson's view was that the other qualities of the series (acting, shooting, writing, plotting) were enough to overlook the inequalities of its costume policy. And the far greater quantity of female than male full-frontal scenes in screen drama results from something more complicated than just male chauvinism in the production process.

The standard compositions of TV sex scenes – the woman, with her breasts showing, on top of the man; or the man on top of the woman, whose breasts are showing – follow from the widely acknowledged theory that sexual arousal in men has a more dramatic visual indication than for women, and the regulatory and legal convention that erect penises are seen only in pornography or, more recently, 18 certificate movies. So, on television, if an actor is shown walking fully-naked towards a bed before a passionate love scene, application of the editorial guidelines raises distracting issues about his enthusiasm for the relationship.

But, while this excuse is true, it does also encourage lazy direction. The fact that an actor can't be shown fully naked during sex but that an actress can doesn't mean that the latter has to be. It is possible to film bedroom scenes while protecting the modesty of both participants – and certainly Homeland would not have suffered from a lower nipple count. Hit & Miss, however, fascinatingly fleshes out the debate over how naked bodies should be shown.