The Sexiest TV Scenes of All Time

These are the best scenes in recent years that lit up home screens across the country.

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Complex Original

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Just 20 years ago, this topic would be moot. Sex scenes in TV consisted of Bill and Claire Huxtable winking at each other. But over the past few years, as TV has enjoyed a golden era the likes of which it's never seen before, many of its previous boundaries have fallen away as well (these two developments are probably not mutually exclusive). We've come a long way from Dennis Franz's bare ass on NYPD Blue making headlines—now season premieres feature a bare ass on the receiving end of some trendy foreplay, fam.

But it's deeper than pay-cable shows merely running wild without an FCC chaperone. TV across all sub-genres, from HBO all the way down to ABC, has gotten, well, hotter. And more importantly, equality is at an all-time high. Sex scenes from a woman's perspective, same-sex scenes, Transparent...the landscape (whether network, cable, or Internet) is extremely lit on some Kinsey shit.

It's a markedly less prude world we're living in these days, and the gods behind your favorite series have been quick to respond. Suddenly, watching TV with the family is now a cause for a lot more uncomfortably awkward moments. And while the angry letters from lame parents keep pouring in, the wave shows no signs of stopping. Series like dearly departed Californication or True Blood, and American Horror Story are gaining reputations for wild sex that they try to top (sorry) with each passing season. Meanwhile the rise of Internet original series has created an even more lawless approach to censorship chill. It's a great time to be an adult watching TV, bruh. These are some of the best sex scenes to grace the tube in recent years. 

34. Josh gets extra close with his babysitter in Transparent

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33. Buffy and Angel achieve true happiness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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Episode: "Surprise" (Season 2, Episode 13)

Buffy The Vampire Slayer was rarely afraid to make uncomfortable aspects of adolescence all too literal through its vampires, werewolves, and assorted demons, even when the result was almost impossible to watch. Case in point: Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) losing her virginity to her vampiric beau Angel (a pre-Bones David Boreanaz) midway through the show's second season. Spoiler alert: "perfect happiness" makes Angel lose his soul and revert to being an evil vamp, setting up Buffy's ex to be the bad guy for half of season two. It's an effective treatment of a dude sleeping with a girl and never calling her again, but what makes it even sadder is that the sex scene is shot to be moving and sensual, like the least corny after-school special ever. Buffy and Angel are really in love, and it's a shame that for the Slayer that sex has consequences. —Eric Thurm

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31. "Mutual oral" goes down in The Americans

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30. Alison and Cole rev up on the hood of their car in The Affair

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29. Virgina takes control in Masters of Sex

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28. Mer and Der go to prom in Grey's Anatomy

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Episode: "Losing My Religion" (Season 2, Episode 27)

Grey's Anatomy is washed now, sure, but at its peak? Even the most anti of ABC soap operas watched a handful of episodes, and Seattle Grace's prom episode is definitely one of the five or so you'll shamefully admit to having seen. There's a lot going on, as always with this show, but the highlight is Derek (Patrick Dempsey) and Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) calling quits on the fuckshit tension and literally running off the dance floor—away from their respective partners (his wife, her boyfriend) mind you—and to a closet to officially declare what they've spent the better part of a season running away from. The catharsis is palpable. —Frazier Tharpe

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26. Jax and Tara don't care who's watching in Sons of Anarchy

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25. Patrick and Kevin finally give into the tension in Looking

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24. Eric falls into another win in Entourage

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23. Dexter gives into chemistry in Dexter

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Episode: "Do the Wrong Thing" (Season 7, Episode 6)

Dexter (Michael C. Hall) isn't supposed to feel...feelings. He may have loved his wife Rita in some way, but it was more facade than anything else. But Hannah McKay (Yvonne Strahovski)? That intense attraction was palpable from her first scene early on in the show's seventh and last good season, and the heat went through the roof when Dexter unleashed his sexual tension in the most clever play off of his usual kill method. She's on his table, naked, covered in plastic, as is his ritual. After some verbal foreplay he brings the knife down...and instead rips the plastic sheet-wrap off and gets it going right there on his kill table. Who says homicidal sociopaths are incapable of passion? Fuck a "Dark Passenger"—when the chemistry is lit, a different urge takes over. —Frazier Tharpe

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21. Brian and Justin hook up in Queer as Folk

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Episode: Pilot (Season 1, Episode 1)

Much like its Showtime counterpart The L Word, Queer as Folk was a game-changer in same-sex representation on television. Fitting then, that the best sex scene across its entire run is Brian (Gale Harold) and Justin's (Randy Harrison) first hookup in the pilot, i.e. the first guy-on-guy sex scene ever televised. Not that it actually needs a bonus point bump for history. —Frazier Tharpe

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19. Marty and his mistress in True Detective

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18. Samantha and her fireman in Sex and the City

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17. Jon Snow shows Ygritte he actually does know some things in Game of Thrones

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Episode: "Kissed by Fire" (Season 3, Episode 5)

It could've been lightweight corny, when upon Jon Snow (Kit Harington) going south on his northern star-crossed lover, she flips her trademark derisive catchphrase to acquiesce that he does indeed know a "thing" or two. But the scene's sizzle is so on point, even the most obvious of jokes are able to safely land. Convenient that in the middle of the arctic north Jon and Ygritte (Rose Leslie) find a hot spring in which to consummate their Montague/Capulet-style affair, but nevertheless it's the perfect escape, a quiet break from the realities of their doomed situation that they can reflect on later when it all goes to shit. And it goes to shit, very quickly. But they'll always have that sweltering hot cave, the one they sent up a few degrees higher for a day. —Frazier Tharpe

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16. Kate and Sawyer's caged heat in Lost

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Episode: "I Do" (Season 3, Episode 6)

Nothing gets you hot and bothered like captivity, huh? If there's one good thing to come out of season three's tedious cage arc, at least it presents forward movement on the Great Island Love Triangle (right before it morphed into a rhombus, hi Juliet!). With Sawyer's (Josh Holloway) imminent death looming, Kate (Evangeline Lilly) sneaks over to his cell to give him a proper last night on Earth. Right there in the hot, tropical jungle in clothes they've been breaking rocks in for days and who knows when they last bathed and out in the open where any Other captor can see and—OH, Jack picked the perfect time to walk by Ben's surveillance feed that he has trained on them, didn't he? —Frazier Tharpe

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14. Marnie gets rimmed in Girls

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13. Henry and Anne Boleyn get it poppin in The Tudors

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12. Claire forgets the future and lives in the present in Outlander

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Episode: "The Wedding" (Season 1, Episode 7)

It's deeper than just same-sex relationships. There's also been a stark deficiency in female protagonists across prestige television. The efforts to right that wrong took another step with last year's Outlander, the sci-fi romantic drama that made everyone suddenly have to pay attention to Starz original programming. Our heroine is Claire (Catriona Balfe), a WWII nurse who finds herself transported to 1743 Scotland. She's a sharp, worthy protagonist and most importantly, maintains her own agency. So when she finally gives into her feelings for the hunky past Scot Jamie (Sam Heughan), it's crushing to think of the husband she's been trying to stay faithful to. But it's also too hot to really care about poor, present-day Frank. There's gotta be a time travel clause, right? —Frazier Tharpe

 

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10. Jason and Amy sex on V in True Blood

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9. Fitz hits it from the back in Scandal

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Episode: "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" (Season 2, Episode 14)

You have to give Shonda Rhimes credit. The various sex scenes between Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) run the gamut from tastefully romantic to downright smutty. This scene, in which Fitz grabs Olivia by the arm and throws her into an electrical closet so that they can have angry sex standing up, is closer to the latter.

If you ignore the infantile symbolism that Scandal writers insist on littering each sex scene with—this one is so…electrifying—this particular scene is actually pretty hot. After O.P. smacks the POTUS in the face for being a two-timing philanderer, she attacks him a different kind of weapon—her wet mouth. The two commence to have the kind of raw, passionate sex that’s reserved for people who have nothing left to lose and everything to gain if they just give in to their lust and desire. The result is a frenetic, shadowy, and yes, electrifying moment of sexual energy. —Lauretta Charlton

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7. Alice and Dana consummate in the most R-rated way possible in The L Word

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6. The shower scene in Orange Is the New Black

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5. Hank makes the biggest mistake of his life in Californication

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4. Megan does some house-cleaning in her lingerie in Mad Men

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Episode: "A Little Kiss" (Season 5, Episode 1)

What to make of the new Mrs. Draper? That's the question season five's premiere was tasked with solving after four ended with Don's (Jon Hamm) impulsive second engagement to his former secretary. And by the end of the two-hour premiere, we sure got a good look at her, pun intended. After her fantastic misread (of course Don Draper would loathe a birthday party where his co-workers are the invited guests, in his own home no less) sends Don into a bratty spiral, she fires back in one of the most erotically charged scenes in a series that trafficks in them. Not sold on Don's new marriage? Surely you changed your mind when her lingerie-maid stunt resulted in some forceful, hot make-up(?) sex right there in the brand new Chateau Draper. Welcome to the main cast, Megan. —Frazier Tharpe

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2. Jimmy and Gretchen have the opposite of a meet-cute in You're the Worst

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