It’s Not Your Imagination, ‘Game of Thrones’ Had Way Fewer Nude Scenes in Later Seasons
One of the hardest things to do in fiction is make expository dialogue seem interesting. Writers tend to call it “laying pipe” because you need to get the information to the audience for the story to work but it’s very hard to make a talking-head info dump a memorable scene.
Television shows and movies go to great length to present these scenes in an interesting way. In the famous script writing guide Save the Cat, screenwriter Blake Snyder covered the issue in detail with an example he used in one of his films and Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon have talked about it on the Rick and Morty DVD commentary tracks.
Game of Thrones (and other prestige television shows) tended to use sexposition for these foundational dialogue scenes, which is to say they distracted you from exposition dumps with tits. Mr. Skin, the definitive authority on what scenes in what shows you can use to jerk off to your favorite celebrities, recently catalogued all the nudity in Game of Thrones‘ entire run (link NSFW).
The thing that stands out the most is that yes, the amount of nudity on the show went down as the show went on, with the exception of a slight resurgence in season five. Season one had 19 nude scenes compared to just six in the penultimate season. The site doesn’t have stats for season eight but I can only think of two or three nude scenes and they were all incredibly brief. Keep in mind this is a show that once created a new character (Esme Bianco’s Ros) just to be in sexposition scenes and is rumored to have killed her off because she wanted a no nudity clause in her renegotiated contract. The quality of the nudity went downhill, too. Remember Emilia Clarke’s sex scenes in season one? Compare those to her eventual rumpy pumpington with Jon Snow at the end of season six where all we saw was a bit of Kit Harrington’s ass.
If you’ve ever wondered how much nudity there actually was, the site reports that over the course of the series we saw 134 boobs, 60 butts, 28 vaginas and 7 dongs over 108 minutes of on-screen nudity. Emilia Clarke and Kit Harrington are the two stars people wanted to see naked the most, which makes their disappointing sex scene all the more disappointing.
Rewatching Game of Thrones is certainly going to be an interesting experience. Back in the halcyon days of season one the show was still sexy and well-written, a big departure from the extended boobless montage sequence that was the final two.
