Liberté Égalité Nudité

From the description, this seems like a very interesting production. The premise – that in 2026 wearing any clothes has been made illegal in France, so everyone’s required to be naked in public – seems a bit far-fetched. The reason, ostensibly, is to discourage terrorism and street violence. Well, OK, but it’s not more improbable than the premises of many or most science fiction stories. I can imagine that some people who aren’t even naturists might actually go along with the idea. And most naturists would celebrate. Perhaps this might be considered to be “social science fiction”.

Apparently, there’s still crime in France, however. Why else would la gendarmerie figure prominently in the story? One wonders what role the nudity actually plays in the story. It seems that the idea behind requiring everyone to be naked was “transparency”. But it’s not clear that mandated nudity can prove to solve the underlying problems of violence. Merely dispensing with clothing is unlikely to be a panacea for the very deep flaws in human nature. There really need to be many more fictional explorations of what life in a modern society that goes clothesfree might be like.

Evidently, though, it wasn’t especially hard to recruit a cast that’s required to remain naked at all times. Initially there were concerns about the difficulty of

“amassing a cast willing to bare all on camera. But while Fox [the series creator] admits he thought the prospect would be “impossible,” he adds: “We sent all the scripts to the agents and had a very good response from them. All the actors knew they would be naked. We had some well-known actors wanting to do it too, which was very surprising for us.”

Figaret [an investor in the project] picks up: “The quality of the writing meant people understood this show was not just about being naked. We thought it would be very difficult but we had actors who have been on stage and acted naked and didn’t mind doing it as long as it had some meaning. It was very strange but easy to cast. Everybody was just excited about doing something different.””