Gallery
Television has become a lot sexier in the last few decades, but how we define sex and depict relationships has also shifted along the way. In the late 1980s, sexy used to mean running down the beach in her red swimsuit in Baywatch. Although that’s iconic in its own right, the medium has shifted along with our culture and television’s evolution as a medium, bringing forward more complex representations of sexuality and gender that pierce through the tired male gaze. It also helps that the premium cable and streaming eras now allow for spicier content that wasn’t possible within the constraints of broadcast television regulations. Networks like HBO began shaking the table by showcasing nudity (often quite gratuitously), and Showtime green-lit many series that pushed the envelope for queer representation like Queer as Folk and .
In the last fifteen years, there have been a number of watershed moments for sexy television—from Olivia Pope getting hot and bothered by the president on Scandal to exploring the power of kink on . There have also been more nuanced depictions of sexual assault and consent (I May Destroy You, for example), showcasing our more sophisticated cultural understanding of sex and dating. , professionals on set who help map out the choreography of intimate scenes, have been a recent addition to the industry, with the goal of providing safer psychological spaces and safeguards on set for actors actually delving into these moments.
Our list below contains a few trailblazers—like , obviously—and many others that have more recently contributed to the canon of sexy television, in some way breaking the mold of intimacy on scripted television, or at the very least, giving us a titillating good time—earning them an entry as one of the sexiest television series of all time.
It feels appropriate to begin this list with one of the true originators of Sexy TV. Sex and the City undoubtedly broke ground for sex on television by showcasing a group of single 30-something friends navigating love and dating in New York City. Although in hindsight, not every storyline holds up by today’s appropriately-set standards; Carrie Bradshaw was oddly conservative (and sometimes bi-phobic) for a sex columnist. But each of the four women brought their own perspective to a radically sex-positive show that always placed sexy at the forefront.
Before 2005, who knew that surgery could be so sexy? Shonda Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy put the horny in medicine by having its surgical residents hooking up in on-call rooms, often with each other, but sometimes with their bosses (Meredith Grey, I’m looking at you). Although its steamiest episodes are in the earlier, more acclaimed seasons, Grey’s continues its sexy legacy to this day, twenty years later, by still having new stories to tell about sex and sexuality—between traumas, of course.
