Admittedly I rarely if ever watch prime time network TV anymore. But something about that stat does not pass the smell test.
I remember a preacher on TV telling us all that we’d be seeing full frontal nudity on soap operas within 5 years.
That was in 1982. It hasn’t happened, and the soaps themselves are going the way of the dinosaur.
If this is happening it is in the usual and expected places,
like Cinemax.
Actually, in 1982, it wasn’t entirely absurd to expect nudity in soaps in the near future. Before President Reagan was elected and things calmed down, there actually was full frontal nudity, non-pixelated, on broadcast television, as well as topless women, including a story on topless female boxing in South Africa on a 7:30PM New York City news broadcast and plenty of stuff on PBS ranging from unedited Masterpiece Theater episodes (I, Claudius, Therese Raquin, and Danger: UXB) shown at 9PM and 10PM to independent films shown late at night, including one showing a baby being born in graphic detail. The various networks were putting out feelers until President Reagan was elected. I’m not sure if his administration specifically clamped down or not, but you can look at what PBS was showing on Masterpiece Theater until 1980 and then after, for example, and see the difference.
I suppose I should also point out that I lived in Japan for a year in the late 1990s and that showed me two things. First, I had access to limited English-language television so wound up watching stuff carried by a satellite channel from the 1970s and 1980s, including things like CHiPs, and those shows weren’t bad despite being fairly clean. Second, the one year absence made it pretty clear to me just how much more permissive things became over a year, something I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d seen it happen more slowly over the course of a year.