Where Have All The Boob Shows Gone?

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. 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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Howdy, folks! I’m back from vacation! Don’t all resubscribe to paid posts at once, lol lfmao (*crying emoji*)! Make a line, form an orderly slop queue!

I don’t like to do a lot of combination/rundown-type posts, since analytics tells me they don’t do as well, but having to play catch up has forced my hand. We’re doing a This Week in Posters, but there’s some other stuff to get to first, so bear with me. (Bare with me? Foreshadowing!).

Where Have All The Boob Shows Gone?

The other day I was thinking about how prestige TV and nudity used to be intertwined. From Sopranos on through basically to Game of Thrones and slightly beyond, the idea of illicit content and smart watercooler shows aimed at adults were basically connected. In the same way that porn pioneered a lot of different internet technologies, I’m not sure we’d even have the prestige TV era without softcore nude shows on premium cable.

These days, almost every premium streamer and paid cable channel seems to be attempting watercooler content for adults as their flagship programming, and yet the majority of that programming is nudity-free. How did that happen?

Anyway, this was the stupid idea I talked GQ into letting me write about, that you can read here. I got to talk to Mr. Skin, Alan Sepinwall, and Masters of Sex creator Michelle Ashford (if you’ve never seen Masters of Sex, it’s fantastic) for the piece.

Top Chef is Going to the Carolinas

Bravo just announced the destination for next season’s Top Chef: The Carolinas.

Pack your knives, TopChef Season 23 is heading to the Carolinas! Our Cheftestants will compete in southern hospitality, while embracing the rich Carolina history and cooking in the great outdoors. We will be traveling and competing across Charlotte, N.C and Greenville, S.C. [TopChef on Instagram]

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a person in real life describe that area as “The Carolinas,” but it sounds more like that’s just the name they gave to a season that’s going to be set in Charlotte, North Carolina and Greenville, South Carolina. Name aside, it seems like focusing on two cities makes more sense than trying to cover all of two different states.

This will be Top Chef’s second trip to South Carolina, after doing Charleston in 2016. A friend pointed out that they’ve still never done a season in Atlanta, which does seem kind of crazy. In terms of the south, they’ve done Texas, New Orleans, Miami, Charleston, and Houston. Still waiting with bated breath for them to announce Top Chef Fresno, but so it goes.

This Week In Movie Posters

Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. All posters via IMPA.

I’m very excited to see a Pixar movie in which the main characters aren’t humans (related: all the Pixar movies, ranked). Other than that, this new teaser poster for Hoppers is playing it pretty cryptic. “Human. Nature.” A beaver standing on… a scale? Staring at his hands? Any guesses before I consult IMDB? I’m getting “human and beaver get into some kind of Freaky Friday situation,” though that wouldn’t really explain the title. Beavers are more into slapping than hopping, in my experience.

An animal lover uses technology that places her consciousness into a robotic beaver to uncover mysteries within the animal world beyond her imagination. [IMDB]

Okay, I was pretty close. Anyway, if I wanted to get inside a robot beaver I’d call… Elon Musk? Sam Altman? Feels like there’s a lot of entendre potential here but I can’t quite make it come together. Sounds like my sex life! Heyoo!

Bold to make the entire poster about one pull-quote. That had to be a big day that Next Best Picture offices.

Years into their relationship, Tim and Millie find themselves at a crossroads as they move to the country. With tensions already flaring, an encounter with an unnatural force threatens to corrupt their lives, their love and their flesh. [IMDB]

Solid synopsis. Better than the pull-quote, if you ask me. Hate when an unnatural force corrupts my flesh.

Tron Ares, huh? Is this like when Sufjan Stevens said he was going to make an album about all 50 states and then only finished two? Ten bucks says they don’t even make it to Tron Sagittarius.

Incidentally, the IMDB page for this one says that Jared Leto is playing Ares. I genuinely don’t know if that’s a prank.

This new poster for the Naked Gun remake is a bit of a conundrum: is it supposed to be funnier because the legs look fake? And is that true? Would a genuine piggyback be better or worse than this? I’m honestly not sure. All I know is that if I was marketing this, I would never stop reminding people that it’s from the director of Popstar.

Oh yeah, baby, they made a second Mortal Kombat movie. Which raises an interesting question: they made a first Mortal Kombat movie? I mean, I know they made one when I was in middle school, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a sequel to that. Subsequent research shows that they made another in 2021 that I clearly memory-holed.

Anyway, can you imagine if you were an actor and they made an entire poster specifically for your character and then they didn’t even put your name on it? It’s hard to think of something more insulting than that. There are like 15 of these, by the way.