Basic Cable Porn: A Comprehensive Power Ranking

Coming of Age

A term that has been used to describe the growth from adolescence to adulthood. Boyhood to manhood.

Just the other day I was thinking about this period of time in my own life. I was cruising through YouTube out of boredom and found myself watching an old episode of Baywatch that featured Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, and Ric Flair. But what I failed to realize was that it had Pamela Anderson before at least 3 unneeded breast augmentations. It also had the angelic Yasmine Bleeth, the BASEketball beauty.

I might sound like the old man telling kids, "In my day...", but what is true is that future generations from here on out will not know the...let's say "pleasure" you got from places other than the internet.

You'd read your mother or sister's Victoria Secret catalog or got your hands on the Sports Illustrate Swimsuit Edition, Maxim, or FHM.

For those fortunate as myself you could look no further than your cable television package. Especially, if also like me, you had your own TV in your bedroom.

What I have done is comprised a list of Cable TV shows that were as close to porn as you can get.

9. Desperate Housewives

Well this was on ABC so you didn't even need cable to watch this . Every main female character on this show was quite gorgeous except for Felicity Huffman, well they needed to level off somewhere. We never saw the Real Lois Lane, Teri Hatcher, in her undies but we saw plenty of Eva Longoria. Eva was fine but I have a thing for red heads. The one episode where Marcia Cross surprised her husband in a hotel room remains an all-timer for me. The fact that this show moved it's storylines from sex to god knows what shied me away in its later years hence its low ranking.

8. Wild On

Wild On was a travel show on E! hosted by several different hotties and featured several diffrent hotties in different locales with said host hotties. There were bikinis and sexy club outfits. A great watch on a late Saturday night for teenage boys. It was also the pregame for the next entry on the list.

7. Girls Gone Wild Paid Programming Commercials.

These infomercials included the wild parties where girls would show some boobs for beads, shirts, or a ham sandwich, maybe. Only problem with this was the boner killer that was the guy that ran GGW, Joe Francis. He looked like the guy that would be running GGW, that's the creepy thing about him. He looked like the type of guy that felt girls up when they were passed out drunk. Later in life I watched a full GGW feature and the infomercials were a lot better. The setup was a bus or hotel room and a drunk/uncomfortable girl. Thank god this fad faded.

6.  Syndicated Dating Shows

These shows included Blind Date, Elimidate, and the 5th Wheel. They were everywhere, channel 9, cable, Telemundo maybe. This was during the early part of reality television so there was a lot of luster to watching real people do stuff. Giving a rough estimate I'd say 84% of the women on these shows were hotties. They had Jacuzzis and bikinis. Blind Date had those funny cartoons and captions on the screen so it also had entertainment value.

5.  Undressed

MTV experimented with a show called Undressed. It was a late night soap opera that followed their 10-10:30pm timeslot known as the 10 Spot. It was like porn in that it had amateur acting. In retrospect it had all the stuff porn did before the sex. I found out that Christina Hendricks was on this show, let that sink in, Joan from Mad Men was on a show about sex and you missed it because this show stunk.

4.Wrestling

At this time there were three wrestling promotions, WWF/E, WCW, and ECW. Unlike today where WWE promotes a PG style of programming, all of the promotions were trying to outdo each other and push limits. WCW had Nitro Girls. WWE had Sable, Trish Stratus, Lita, Stacy Keibler, and Torrie Wilson. ECW had Dawn Marie and Francine. The thing about Francine and Dawn Marie was that if you found an episode of BangBus from 2000 and one or both were on it, it would not surprise me one bit.

3. Baywatch Re-runs

While I am old enough to remember Baywatch from its first run. When TNN (now known as Spike) showed re-runs as part of their re-brand as a male focused network I enjoyed coming home from school and watching it more than I did then. There was a perennial torch passed from hot lifeguard to hot lifeguard in the history of this show. From Erika Eleniak to Pamela Anderson to Carmen Electra and so on.

2. BET Uncut

Some of you may not know what BET Uncut was, especially if you didn't watch BET. Odds are you discovered it during the summer because it came on at 2am. It featured music videos that were too racy for TV or uncut versions of music videos that had been edited down for TV. Eventually the video block disappeared not because of its content but the trend of music channels distancing themselves from...well, music.

"Oh that's your girl, N***a you ain't heard, she naked in my studio, I'm on my Howard Stern shit"

-Big Sean

1. The Howard Stern Show

He had porn stars, nude models, and all kinds of strippers on his show. Looking back on it I wonder what it was like to listen to this on the radio, couldn't be as enjoyable. The only thing I didn't care for was this one stripper with this ridiculously mousy voice. Other than that I was introduced to a bunch of porn stars I never knew. I still have yet to go to Score's here in New York but Stern definitely put them on the map. Last but not least, he had chicks riding the Sybian, a god damn Sybian on TV.