‘Naked Attraction’ Might Be the Weirdest Show on Streaming

Dating Naked meets The Dating Game meets full-frontal nudity in Max’s bizarre new unintentional parody of streaming, 90s TV tropes, and general Britishness.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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Slight preamble here: I originally wrote this piece for GQ about four months ago, and for whatever reason, they still haven’t used it. It’s not going to be relevant forever (assuming it ever was) so I made an executive decision to just skip the middleman and share it with you all here before it gathers too much moss. Enjoy! (No refunds).

Max

While it’s been mostly sad watching David Zaslav turn the once cool brand HBO into just another vertical in an alphabet soup of corporate holdings through increasingly shitty decisions, there is occasionally a silver lining. Never before have we been able to go looking for the Sopranos or Succession and wind up in a parallel universe of foreign reality stew to binge commercial free. (Dating and reality shows with no commercial breaks are a little like fentanyl, at a certain point it’s possible that the narcotics are too good).

I’m lying a little here. In truth I flipped on Naked Attraction because a friend had become obsessed with it and told me about it. I probably would’ve had no idea it was there otherwise. Still, it was there, available to stream on “Max.” I won’t bury the lede: it’s a dating show with uncensored full frontal nudity. Just as teen me once fired up Real Sex on HBO, Naked Attraction offers hope that today’s teens can have a similar experience: of being lured by the promise of naked bodies, only to gradually forget, maybe even regret, that those had ever made us horny.

Naked Attraction premiered in 2016 in the UK, but quietly hit Max late this past fall. The concept is easy to understand, because the show doesn’t really do anything new. Yet the combination of its familiar tropes is so odd and uncanny that watching it feels like something you stumble upon in a foreign hotel TV and wonder if you’ve being pranked.

Naked Attraction takes the basic conceit of Dating Naked (which itself premiered on Vh-1 in 2014) – that potential mates should see each other nude right off the bat – and removes the censor blurs. It also adds in a Dating Game format: six singles, competing to woo one main contestant for a date. 

The singles begin the show standing on colored platforms on the stage behind privacy screens (at first obscuring our and the dater’s view). At the beginning of the show, after a brief introduction with the (clothed) dater, host Anna Richardson (avowedly bisexual, theoretically qualifying her to weigh in on the attractiveness of both male and female contestants) asks the crew to raise the screens. This just after a quick vignette about why this dater wants to be on this show – usually something about how they’ve been unlucky at love, how they’re sick of people who lie in their Tinder photos, and blah blah blah. This sometimes includes a cameo from the daters’ mums, lovingly encouraging the dater to go and find love by evaluating naked bodies on TV (weird!). 

Then it’s back to the studio for the first round. In this one, the screen raises to just above waist level, requiring the dater to evaluate, and make the first cut, based on nothing but the look of the contestants’ (live) penises, bums, balls, and vaginas (yes, technically vulva, anatomy sticklers, but the show is not keen on this distinction). “Raise your cock up a little and give us a look at the balls,” Richardson will occasionally say Britishly.

The screen keeps rising from here. (Max)

Yes, we’re talking close-up shots of generally uncircumcised penii and generally well-groomed vaginae here. Not only that, Richardson and the dater walk from platform to platform critiquing the various penises and vaginas, riffing on the qualities of each and what the dater generally looks for in one. “Do you prefer a long willy or a thick one? Do you like a vagina that’s all tucked up, or one that’s splayed open and glistening?” The daters are not allowed to speak in the early rounds, even as their genitals are being evaluated like faucet options and carpet swatches.

Certainly I’m risking sounding like the Puritanical American in writing about this like it’s exotic and absurd, but it’s truly not the sex or nudity aspects of it that feel disconcerting. It’s the disembodied, detached evaluation of it all, with the person just standing there, listening quietly. The things people will submit themselves to for reality TV. Isn’t all so awful and so wonderful?

As if the content wasn’t odd enough in its own right, the execution manages to combine 2020s sex positivity with light, lad mag cheekiness that feels thoroughly British, and 1990s production values for a show that would’ve been too racy for the 90s. The host and dater’s evaluation is constantly, jarringly interrupted by facty vignettes straight out of Pop-Up Video or Manswers, featuring Richardson’s disembodied voice breezily, confidently reading psuedostatistics that sound like they couldn’t possibly be true or scientific – “scientists have found that people with more than 27 moles on their bodies age at a slower rate than those with fewer” – usually illustrated in child-like animations that look like they came from the same production company as those Duluth Trading Company ads that air during NFL games. It ends up feeling unstuck in time.

The show usually goes something like, Richardson and the dater walking around pointing at the contestant’s crotches and Richardson asking the dater if she prefers a dangly scrotum or a tight one, followed by a vignette showing animated scrotums while the voiceover explains that bigger testicles have been linked to higher testosterone production, which somehow explains why your average Essex lass might fancy them in a hook-up. It’s somehow both crushingly mundane and deeply depraved, in a way that feels like only British people could’ve envisioned it. “You prefer a slappier scrotum, do you?”

The dater eliminates the first contestant (“I just didn’t like the way she stands, seems like she’d make a naggy wife”), who, again, is just standing right there mute with their naked crotch exposed. The eliminated contestant’s screen is then raised, to give the dater a taste of what they’ll be missing. And then the eliminated comes out to give the dater a brief greeting and sometimes a chaste hug (usually with the crotch leaned politely away). Another brief vignette provides the full reveal for the eliminated dater: name, age, occupation, and a quick edit of them with their clothes back on. “This is Giles, a 22-year-old Zookeeper’s Apprentice from Cockermouth,” (both a real occupation described in the show and an actual place another contestant was from, respectively, believe it or not).  

(Max)

On it goes, as the screens are raised a little more each round, from waist to shoulders, from shoulders to entire body, from entire body to a question-and-answer round, like Love is Blind in reverse. The questions in the Q&A are usually the same. “What is your favorite and least favorite part of your body?” The contestants are also urged to compare themselves to one another. “I’d love to have his cock,” says one male contestant while checking out another, to the giggles of all.

Before the final round, the dater comes back onstage naked too, it being only fair. “So, what do you think?” “Oh, she’s fit. Right fit,” and so forth. 

Throughout, it raises all sorts of questions. Who would go on this kind of show? What’s it like for a contestant who has just had his penis rejected for all the world to see when he has to face his coworkers at the zoo on Monday, knowing they’ve all just seen his hairy balls and buttcrack on national TV? Again, it seems both deeply depraved – reality show producers holding up the participants for maximum scorn and ridicule for our perverse entertainment – and sweetly innocent simultaneously. Some declare that appearing on the show has helped them to finally be comfortable in their own skins and love their bodies. The format also does strip away the artifice and presentation dating normally involves, with all the clothes and accessories and markers of personal branding and social class we so easily take for granted suddenly invisible or irrelevant.

What titillation there is wears off surprisingly quickly. My wife, watching her first episode with me, upon seeing two male contestants eager with the anticipation of seeing the female dater naked, declared “men are so stupid.”

She put on a mock-deep, meathead moron voice. “Durrr, I can’t wait to see her tits. Duhhh, I love looking at naked tits.” 

What could I say? She kind of nailed us.

And yet, in flipping the usual script, starting with the genitals and working outwards towards cultural niche, it does inspire us to reimagine what’s actually important in a mate and in a relationship far better than all the shows that pretend to be about compatible personalities. Sometimes contestants with attractive bodies put their clothes on and instantly become less attractive. Knowing that that’s even possible offers its own intriguing comment on how bound up sexual attraction is with all of those markers of class, culture, branding, and personal style. It exposes an often unacknowledged phenomenon, that maybe the viability of a partner isn’t only about what they are to you, but what they say about you to everyone else.

The show also ends up being weirdly boring, in a way that might actually be affirming. It takes barely an episode or two to become all but desensitized to the nudity. And you quickly discover that, even in a self-selecting pool of mostly horny 20-somethings proud of their naked form, bodies really do come in virtually all shapes and sizes, with combinations of attractive and unattractive qualities to all of them that are mostly in the eye of the beholder. The glib tone suddenly seems fitting, recognizing the general truth of so many treacly platitudes.

Is there such a thing as teachable trash? Perhaps so. Maybe the best kind of dating reality show is one that trains you to be bored of it.

Housekeeping

-Yes, I will have new movie reviews soon. Stay tuned.

-ICYMI (in case you missed it), we started an audio version of The #Content Report. The first episode, featuring me and Joey Devine discussing the latest episode of Top Chef on the Frotcast Top Chef post-show, is live. In the future, I’m going to start making audio versions of posts in case you want to listen instead of read.

-We did do a new Frotcast this week over on Patreon. Bobby Hacker joined to talk Road Warrior, Joe Sinclitico Zoom bombed us from Nordstrom Rack (“Hey, I’m at Nordstrom Rack, dude”), and we talked about the Beavis media machine and Alan Sepinwall run afoul of the Disney mafia. It was fun.

-Have you seen Furiosa yet? What are you waiting for? Once you do, be sure to come back and fight about my Mad Max movie rankings.