After the uproar in February 2004 over what became known as Nipplegate – when Justin Timberlake ripped open Janet Jackson’s bustier in front of an audience of 100m on live television, during that most sacred of American family occasions, the Super Bowl – US television became decidedly bashful about exposing viewers to too much flesh. That brief glimpse of the singer’s errant right breast provoked an astonishing 540,000 complaints to broadcast regulators, many from conservative watchdog groups. CBS was fined $550,000 for the incident and, in the run-up to the 2004 election, conservative politicians, including George W Bush, gained traction for their complaint that television, and the liberal executives who controlled it, were to a great extent responsible for the decline in American cultural values.

In the aftermath, the main networks, fearing government regulation over content, went to extraordinary lengths to avoid giving further offence. CBS pulled a Victoria’s Secret catwalk show from its schedules, while NBC went so far as to edit out a scene from the popular hospital drama ER that would have shown a brief glimpse of an elderly patient’s breast. John Wells, executive producer of ER, was just one of a number of television people who complained of the “chilling effect” on “dramatic integrity”.

“Those few seconds started a renewed obsession with perceived public indecency in this country,” Marty Kaplan, a research professor at the University of Southern California, later said. “Since the Janet Jackson episode, there has been a witch-hunt atmosphere going on in this country, which has to do with our puritan history. It reminds me of the early age of the nation. The pendulum has swung again. We are in a period of public puritanism but private sinfulness.” By private sinfulness Kaplan meant the voracious American consumption of pornography, typically on the internet.

In the three years since Nipplegate, almost everything has changed in American political life. Bush’s standing is so low, and his conservative allies in such disarray, that traditional appeals to family values find no resonance beyond the religious and conservative base. This has so emboldened America’s TV executives, desperate to staunch the haemorrhaging of audiences to the internet, that the autumn schedules offer such an orgy of sexually explicit programming, even Jackson will be blushing.

For British viewers, who will see several of these new series over the course of the autumn, the Janus face of American television can be mystifying. We are used to UK terrestrial channels screening what are effectively “indie” US series, many with risqué content, from cable outfits such as HBO. Even without cable or satellite, UK audiences have been able to witness the rumpy-pumpy popping up in every episode of the HBO/ BBC co-production Rome, or the sexual shenanigans of HBO’s Sex and the City. And Britain’s main networks are nowhere near as coy as their US counterparts, regularly airing – postwatershed – steamy series such as Talk to Me, which made a Sunday-night feature of Max Beesley’s bobbing bum, Footballers’ Wives and Queer as Folk.

Americans, though, have relied on their main networks to offer sanitised, family-friendly fare. The big four – CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox – are subject to oversight of their content from the Federal Communications Commission. Not so the cable channels, which are subscribed to – in various permutations – by two-thirds of American households with a TV. HBO, as a “premium” channel, costs more again, appearing in only about 10% of homes, but its series are also picked up by other cable stations after the first run, and it has been the standard-bearer of touchy content, from violence to sex. So, while the big four have been watching their manners, the cable guys have increasingly been knocking down the barriers where taste and explicit sex are concerned.

The most controversial of the new cable series coming America’s way in the autumn will be HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me. The show is about four couples, ranging in age from their twenties to their sixties, who are all seeing the same psychotherapist. Critics who have seen previews are calling it the most sexually explicit drama ever shown in America. According to the startled TV critic for Time magazine: “The sex scenes are so graphic – organs, angles, fluids – that it’s led some viewers to wonder if the actors are, in fact, doing the deed on screen.” The series features a number of well-known television and theatre actors, including 67-year-old Jane Alexander, who is shown naked and having sex with her TV husband.

But do the actors in Tell Me You Love Me really “do it”? Although HBO and the producers have deliberately left the matter unresolved, no doubt in the hope of attracting prurient viewers, Michelle Borth, who plays Jaime in the show, insists: “We are not porn stars. Our job in any scene is to do it authentically. The sex scenes in any of the episodes are a pretty integral part of the story line.” Intriguingly, perhaps as a sop to conservative critics, all the characters are married or in committed relationships and do not have sex outside those boundaries.

HBO is, disingenuously, claiming to be surprised that critics have focused on the show’s sexual content. “The decision we made wasn’t to push the envelope, but to be honest about the language of intimacy,” says the network’s Carolyn Strauss. In fact, HBO is clearly desperate to find another hit series to keep hold of its 30m fee-paying subscribers. In the past three years, it has lost the three most acclaimed series in its history: Sex and the City, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. None of its subsequent series, including Big Love, about polygamists, and John from Cincinnati, about a Christlike surfer, have had anything like the same impact. But HBO obviously noted that viewers appeared to enjoy the often furious rutting in Rome, which it ran for two seasons.

At the same time, HBO is facing stronger competition from other cable networks. Channels such as FX – with The Shield and Nip/Tuck – have been biting into the audience over which HBO could once claim exclusive sway. FX has also broadcast Dirt, now screening in the UK, featuring Cour-teney Cox – yes, prissy, neat-freak Monica from Friends – as a Machiavellian tabloid magazine editor whose most satisfying and intimate relationship is with her vibrator. Even TNT, best known for rather stodgy western series, has felt it necessary to raise its sexual game with the new series Saving Grace, starring the Oscar-winning actress Holly Hunter as a tormented, fast-living Oklahoma City detective who takes self-destruction to new heights. “She drinks too much, sleeps with the wrong men and defies authority,” TNT proudly says in its publicity. In the first episode, “Holly Hunter sits buck naked, astride a man who is married, but not to her character,” The New York Times noted. “Soon thereafter, Ms Hunter’s character is lighting up a cigarette, adding a bit of Jack Daniel’s to her morning soda, standing nude in front of her window as her elderly neighbour looks on approvingly.”

HBO’s main competition for the sexually inquisitive American viewer, though, is likely to come from Showtime. In the past four years, it has had a minor hit with the lesbian soap The L Word, a show steamy enough to have won a loyal male heterosexual audience in addition to its more obvious demographic. Last season, Showtime also offered much medieval romping in its big historical series The Tudors, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the young and, of course, sexually insatiable Henry VIII.

But Showtime’s new series, Californication, the first television drama David Duchovny has starred in since The X Files, ups the sexual quotient so much, it has already

been dubbed The XXX Files. The comedy features Duchovny as an author who sleeps with as many women as can be squeezed into a half-hour episode, while trying to be a good father to his 12-year-old daughter from a relationship with his ex-girlfriend, played by the British actress Natascha McElhone. The first episode, which goes out in America tomorrow, features five naked bodies, including Duchovny’s.

“Sex is part of the problem with this guy,” Duchovny has said. “But we don’t preach that it’s a problem. It’s not like he wants to kill himself every time he has sex with someone. He’s actually enjoying it, while at the same time realising his time could probably be better spent elsewhere.” Duchovny says he was attracted to the series because it reminded him of 1970s sex comedies such as Shampoo, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. “It’s not done in a gratuitous fashion,” he insists, referring to the sex. “It’s part of the character.” Isn’t it always?

Despite the FCC censorship, the new sexual licence is also edging into mainstream network television. The new CBS series Swingtown is set in suburban Chicago in the mid1970s, where middle-class couples are exploring the mores of the sexual revolution by engaging in spouse-swapping. Then there’s ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money, about the wealthy and oversexed Darling family.

“The content in some autumn shows will undoubtedly fuel those who claim TV is creating a decline in moral values – fretting that will surely grow louder the closer we get to the 2008 election,” says Brian Lowry, who writes for the Hollywood trade paper Variety. But with the Republicans having lost Congress and looking unlikely to win the next presidential election, American television will feel increasingly emboldened to use explicit sex to win back the millions of viewers who have been deserting it. The ultimate irony is that the war in Iraq has rendered Republicans and conservatives so politically impotent that the cultural values they care about are being swept aside with impunity.

For your pleasure

Californication:Five, October David Duchovny as a writer with sex on the brain.

The Tudors:BBC2, late September Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a lusty, washboard-stomached Henry VIII.

Dirty Sexy Money:C4, spring 2008 Peter Krause and Donald Sutherland in the story of the amoral Darlings.

Swingtown:ITV1/ITV3, spring 2008 Jack Davenport stars as a 1970s swinger in the American ’burbs.

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