All last week, Vulture was publishing fascinating “micro” oral histories. Some focused on specific scenes, like Kim vs. Cougar on 24 or the final Six Feet Under montage, while others captured entire shows, including MTV’s Undressed, every teenage boy’s favorite show that aired at 2 a.m. in 2001. Dark times those were, and it didn’t sound like much fun to actually work on Undressed, either. It’s not all boobies this and fluffers that.
[Writer Steven S.] DeKnight: That first season, we wrote, cast, shot, and edited 30 half-hour episodes in about 20 weeks. Which was a frantic pace.
[Writer Dale Roy] Robinson: I was very paranoid, especially the first season, that I’d built this house of cards and that, if anything went wrong, it would all just come collapsing down around my ears. What was interesting is that everything that could go wrong, did go wrong — but because there were so many moving parts, it didn’t matter. We just kept shooting. You know, we’d lose a director, we’d lose an actor, sometimes we’d lose an entire crew off a stage, and within 12-24 hours we were back up and shooting. We just kept going.
But things weren’t all bad:
DeKnight: For the time, especially, I think we got away with murder. There was a teenage oral sex thing that I’m still shocked we got on the air.
The oral history also serves as a reminder that EVERYONE was on Undressed, the Law & Order of the putting-a-banana-on-a-condom crowd: Adam Brody, Max Greenfield, Taran Killam, Jason Ritter, Katee Sackhoff, and most importantly, Christian Hendricks, who got her big break playing Rhiannon in a four-episode arc.
We also found exclusive footage of Roger Sterling’s Undressed audition tape.
Not sure how he didn’t get the role.
