Nude Developments at PBS? You'll Have to Stay Tuned

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

After four days of genuflecting before cable networks at Summer TV Press Tour 2008, pressing executive producers about how they find the right balance of "boobs and beer" to attract the sought-after young male viewer, it's time for critics to don their Decency Police uniforms and beat up PBS for a couple of days -- the time-honored warm-up exercise for the traditional savaging of the commercial broadcast networks.

So, naturally, when PBS chief Paula Kerger took the stage over the weekend to talk about her commitment to bring theater, music, dance and opera back to PBS, including the Royal Shakespeare Company's acclaimed staging of "King Lear" that toured the world last year, the first question asked is:

In the "King Lear" stage production, Ian McKellen does a full-frontal nude scene. How are you going to deal with that on the screen?

Yes, some TV critics are going to be knicker-knotted about 69-year-old nudity.

PBS will bring to millions of viewers the opportunity to see the McKellen-led production of the Shakespeare tragedy. The production made just three U.S. stops -- New York, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Tickets in all locations were sold out months before the production arrived; some were scalped at prices approaching $3,000 a pop. During the famous scene, in which the tragically misguided king descends into madness, McKellen strips off his royal trappings, Newsweek wrote in a Web review at the time.

The prospect of which, more than a year later, has at least one TV critic at the press tour worked into a lather.

"The film is just being shot, and I haven't actually seen the final version yet," Kerger says in response to the critic's question. "We're actually going to bring it to press tour in January, so you'll have a chance to see it then."

"That's a pretty talked-about moment in the stage production where he's fully nude," the critic persists. "How do you feel about showing that in its entirety?" adds the critic, who apparently has inside information.

"Well, again, I haven't seen the taped version yet, so I can't tell you --" Kerger, a stickler for facts, starts to respond.

"But would you be okay with that?" the critic continues, doing his best William Jennings Bryan cross-examining John Scopes.

A nanosecond/eternity of uncomfortable silence follows, broken only by the tap-tap-tapping on laptops: