Sex on TV: It finally is for adults

TV'S GETTING a lot more adult about sex.

Not just since the days when Lucy and Ricky Ricardo slept in separate beds, but since the recent ones when producers of HBO's "Game of Thrones" figured they could throw in a couple of naked women to keep viewers' attention during monologues and no one would call them on it.

Blogger Myles McNutt coined "sexposition" to describe that ploy in 2011, and the term's adoption is just one indication of how, in an age when it may seem that anything goes, some things don't.

Or at least don't pass without notice.

With TV commentary often occurring as shows unfold, sex can't help but be a trending topic. Television's taking notice, going beyond what was once dismissed (or celebrated) as "T&A," to tackle topics like the meaning of consent, what happens when couples hit a sexual drought and even (gasp) virginity.

That's the V-word that, thanks to the CW's "Jane the Virgin," is finally getting a bit of the attention that "vagina" claimed a few seasons ago.

Two of those issues recently collided on Showtime's "Shameless," when 14-year-old Debbie Gallagher (Emma Kenney), eager to lose her virginity, got a much older friend drunk and unknowingly took advantage of him.

Sitcom audiences may snicker at double entendres long after CBS' "Two and a Half Men" ends its run next week. And shows may occasionally seize a moment with things we may not have seen before on television - like a sex act involving Marnie (Allison Williams) in last month's Season 4 premiere of "Girls" that briefly lit up the blogosphere - but when actors and producers talk about sex, it's not only about how much they can get away with.

"Nothing has ever been like, 'Oh, we're on Showtime. We've got to show some titties here,' " said "Shameless" executive producer Nancy Pimental, during a recent network panel.

When "Shameless" characters have sex (as they often do), "I think we're just trying to find the honest truth of what a character would do in that moment, and if the honest truth involves sexuality, it involves intimacy between two characters . . . or violence between two characters, as long as it feels real," it's OK, said star Emmy Rossum.

Not every network has the latitude that Showtime has, but that's not a bad thing, suggested FX Networks CEO John Landgraf, who oversees shows like "The Americans," in which married Russian spies (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) juggle complicated sex lives, and "Married," a comedy that kicked off last summer with a scene in which a husband (Nat Faxon) masturbated next to his wife (Judy Greer).

"I think in some ways it's been great for us that we haven't been able to show full frontal nudity, because it's meant that we couldn't offer the novelty of, 'Oh, look, boobs! Oh, look, there's so-and-so's penis!' " said Landgraf.

"What we found is . . . that some of the funniest, deepest, most character-illuminating things that you can possibly portray actually happen in the bedroom. And that's not the sexy part of sex, that's the intimate and sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes wonderful part of sex."

Or even the lack of sex, a theme not just in "Married," but in HBO's new "Togetherness" (which also features married people masturbating).

It probably wouldn't have been news to the couples on the generation-ago drama "thirtysomething" that people with small children may experience a downturn, but they couldn't have dealt with it quite so graphically then.

And since TV isn't much interested in the sex lives of people with grown children, we may be getting an unnecessarily sad view of married sexuality.

Or, on "The Americans," at least, an unusually complicated one.

"Elizabeth [Russell's character] was raped and Philip [Rhys' character] at a young age was put through sexual training by the KGB, as was Elizabeth, and those things have an impact," executive producer Joel Fields said. So one of the show's writers researched "sex workers and sexual victims and people in plural relationships . . . and it's been the subject of a lot of discussion."

"My favorite scenes in the show are the scenes that are just about the complicated marriage and the inner workings of relationships," said Russell.

For Michelle Ashford, executive producer of Showtime's period drama "Masters of Sex," the challenge wasn't to make "the sex look sexy," but to make it "look as unsexy as humanly possible," because her characters, sex researchers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), approach it as science.

Even what's sexy on-screen may look quite different from the other side of the camera.

Ashford roared as Caitlin FitzGerald, who plays Masters' wife, Libby, revealed, after the Showtime panel, that something she wore during a recent nude scene "has the really catchy title of 'No Toe.' "

And that's just one layer.

"By the time you're done applying all the layers, and then they paint your whole body . . . it actually feels like more than you wear to the beach," FitzGerald said.

"When someone else is pressed up against you, you can't really feel anything."

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