My friend Carly wrote me an e-mail the other day that contained only the subject heading “OMG YOU GUYS” and the following url: undressedtv.com
I can understand the brevity because as soon as I clicked on it and found out what it was, there weren’t really words. Someone is uploading all of the episodes of Undressed from, I’m assuming, their old VHS tape collection (since it’s not out on DVD). They currently have Season 1 up, which I’ve been watching over the past few days.
If you never saw it, then Undressed was this horribly acted show on MTV that was all about sex and who was having it and how. Perhaps their first live action scripted series, but I’m not sure about that. It had three or four vignettes going at once in each episode, running sort of like a soap opera, and each story arc would only last a few episodes each. Characters would drift between vignettes, too, so the main character from one would become the sister of the main character of another a month later.
It’s one of those ensemble cast shows where, for years after it ended, you’d find yourself going, “Don’t I know that guy from somewhere?” in reference to every day actor in a bit part in every tv show or made for tv movie you’d ever see. And the answer almost always came back to, “Wait, wasn’t he that guy that liked that other guy and then had sex in the laundry room with him on Undressed?”
Undressed came out in 1999, which was my senior year of high school, and since almost every other show that dealt with high school life that came out either before or during my high school years (Saved by the Bell, Dawson’s Creek, Buffy) were so beyond different from reality (except for Daria, whose two characters Daria and Jane were EERILY similar, both in personality and in their relationship to each other, to my friend Laura and me) that I just didn’t expect any portrayal of high school to be true to life, I didn’t think of the high school-age characters’ story arcs in Undressed as anything other than fiction. The stories that followed post-college adults? Whatever. They were old.
It was the college-aged kids that got me. I was headed for college in a year and I defy any 1982-born college-bound teenager watching that show for the first time to not have had the thought, “So, wait, are people REALLY gonna be having sex in the laundry room all the time, because that’s, like, where I’m gonna want to clean stuff.” And the first time I saw NYU’s Hayden dorm’s laundry room, I had two reactions: 1) Wow, it’s a LOT dirtier in here than it is on Undressed. And 2) Why is that guy looking at me like that? I’ve gotta get out of here.
The funniest part about watching Undressed now is how innocent it seems. Kiki, the promiscuous blonde (who’s in a monogamous relationship when the show starts, so I don’t really get the whole promiscuous tip) gives her nerdy roommate a vibrator as a gift so she could stop being so uptight and when Gina’s unable to get off by fantasizing about the disgusting male models in a Playgirl-style magazine, she assumes that Gina’s a lesbian and gives Gina a little peek at her GIANT SATIN GRANNY PANTIES. Hot.
Katie and Dave are having problems in their relationship, so they try sleeping with other people (in their tiny one-bedroom apartment). When Dave’s prospect comes out of the living room and tries to seduce Katie by talking about her “other” “down there” piercing, Katie’s first reaction is, “Wow, I could never let a guy do that to me.” The other girl says, “It wasn’t a guy…” And there’s this whole beat where I guess you’re supposed to be all, “Ohhhhhhhhh, she’s bi! And now THESE two are gonna have sex!” And that may be what I thought way back when, but as I’m watching the show now, I’m like, “So, what, she didn’t think that there are female piercers?”
It’s not like I didn’t know anything about sex back then, either. I knew the basics and I watched Real Sex on HBO (not regularly, obvs, but when I was with a bunch of friends and we were all just trying to act older than we were while simultaneously trying to gross each other out), so I knew about some of the creepier kinds of sex out there, but I guess it was just the proximity to my own college years that made this show make me think that this is what my life was going to be like: mildly unattractive people just constantly trying to hook up with each other and using really cheesy innuendos and metaphors to get their points across (like “eager beavers” and “raincoats”). Oh, and every straight person is going to think at some point that they’re gay.
The other day when I called my friend Mike to tell him about this website, he started watching an episode and said that, despite our degrees from NYU, we had never really been to college, or, at least, the college that we thought we were going to go to from watching Undressed. Which, I have to say, re-watching Undressed, though it has been awesome, has made me really really glad that, if that WAS college, I missed out.
Who knows how long this site will be online, since studios are so quick to scream copyright infringement lately. For now, though, I’m really enjoying remembering what life was like before I was ever independent and before I ever knew anything about anything.