The world’s most mind-blowing sex scenes: TV reviewers who have seen every show going reveal the 15 programmes with boundary-pushing erotic moments that really are worth your time

Rivals (Disney+)

Given that it’s an adaptation of one of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster ‘Rutshire’ series of novels, raunchiness is guaranteed here. 

The man behind it is Dominic Treadwell-Collins (EastEnders, A Very English Scandal) who has such fun with everything – especially the sex, which is boundary-pushing in its way here because of the sheer, unabashed, full-frontal guiltless glee of it all. 

The show starts with sex at Mach 1 on Concorde for heaven’s sake, and also gives us naked tennis early on and plenty more besides.

At the centre of the story (and the rivalry) is David Tennant as villainous TV titan Lord Tony Baddingham, a grammar school social climber who married into the aristocracy. His chief rival is the blue-blooded sex machine Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) who, fair warning, we get to see entirely in the altogether, while also in the mix is Aidan Turner as hard-bitten journalist Declan O’Hara, who Lord Tony hires to boost ratings on his TV franchise.

Then there are the women, who range from Bella Maclean as Declan’s sweet daughter Taggie (who Rupert’s desperate to seduce) and Victoria Smurfit as Taggie’s sex-mad mother Maud, to Nafessa Williams as hard-nosed American TV producer Cameron Cook and Katherine Parkinson as local author Lizzie Vereker – essentially the Jilly Cooper character.

That opening Mach 1 sex sets the tone for a suitably lavish show that has just enough deeper character moments to keep it bobbing along neatly dramatically, too. And who cares that Rupert Campbell-Black was originally supposed to be blond – Jilly Cooper has given Hassell’s Black and the whole project her blessing, so put such niggles aside – if they were even an issue in the first place. (Eight episodes)

Secret Diary Of A Call Girl (ITVX)

 ‘Escort, hooker, prostitute, whore… I don’t mind what you call me. That’s just semantics.’ Billie Piper’s first lines direct to camera and us, the viewers, set the tone for a smart, raunchy, playful series about Hannah, a sex worker in modern London.

 Arriving on ITV2 in 2007 it challenged what we’d seen before about lives like Hannah’s with its glamorous portrayal of sex work and the way it gleefully explored fantasies of all kinds. In its way, the show seemed to normalise the profession as just another way of earning money, which was certainly boundary pushing at the time and drew audiences to ITV2 as a result.

Hannah is a clever, cheeky, pragmatic and funny university graduate who makes a living sleeping with men for money (lots and lots of money) under the alter ego Belle. Across four series, we follow her complicated attempts to balance her secret private life (she tells family and friends she’s a legal secretary) with her public relationships in a bustling 21st-century London.

Firmly putting her wholesome Doctor Who image to, ahem, bed, Piper is a charismatic revelation as Hannah, heading up a cast that also includes Cherie Lunghi as her agent and Peaky Blinders’ Iddo Goldberg as ex-boyfriend Ben. (Four series)

The Tudors (Channel 4)

This raunchy royal drama took bodice-ripping to new levels, pushing boundaries for BBC audiences when it first hit our screens in the more innocent, pre-streaming days of 2007. Henry VIII’s list of wives implied that he had a healthy appetite for it, and this production puts his bed-hopping front and centre, showing the royals in an uncommonly risque light. It also depicts Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Henry as a younger, slimmer man than the one we’re used to seeing from his portraits.

With racy romping in all four of the show’s series, his wives and lovers include Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn, Annabelle Wallis as Jane Seymour and Charlotte Salt as Lady Ursula. ‘People had an awful lot of sex at the time; remember there was no TV,’ Rhys Meyers laughs. ‘Sex was very, very important. It’s what you did when the sun went down. They were much more sexually gregarious in the 15th century than we are today.’ And that certainly showed up on screen. (Four series)

The Idol (Sky/Now)

This HBO series about a pop singer’s racy re-invention billed itself as the ‘the sleaziest love story in all of Hollywood’ and it certainly lived up to that. The show certainly pushed boundaries on screen in the deeply sordid sex scenes between Lily-Rose Depp and Abel Tesfaye, which involved some bizarre moments with a scarf and Tesfaye’s character explaining his graphic fantasies.

Lily-Rose, daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, plays pop star Jocelyn, while Abel (the singer also known as The Weeknd) is the sordid cult leader and dark mentor in her reinvention. He created the show with Sam Levinson, the man behind the notoriously graphic HBO drama Euphoria (see below), and did so with the pitch that, due to the fierce loyalty of his fans, ‘if I wanted to start a cult, I could’.

There’s an interesting idea in there about the power of fame and, for some, this undeniably stylish series will appeal as a story of female empowerment, a bold exploration of the dark side of love or even a behind-the-scenes pop satire. For others, it will be a show created by men that exploits all these ideas as an excuse for being flat-out seedy. Watch at your peril! (Five episodes)

Sex/Life (Netflix)

A bored housewife and mother rediscovers lust with an old flame after years of suburban slumber with her husband and small children – and her undiluted pursuit of passion in this adaptation of BB Easton’s novel 44 Chapters About 4 Men which arrived on Netflix in raunchy, 18-rated form includes a speed run through the Kama Sutra and romps in cars, pools, lifts and at a swingers’ party.

It’s the story of Billie (Person Of Interest’s Sarah Shahi), whose husband Cooper is perfectly nice and perfectly good-looking but lacks the animal drives she craves – he finds talking about his job, or watching whatever sport might be on TV, more diverting than paying her the kind of attention she wants. So she starts to look elsewhere for attention, and cultivates a startling double life as an urban sex kitten, a split existence that becomes increasingly precarious in series two as Cooper, who is not the brightest star in the sky, starts to cotton on to his wife’s hidden antics with old flame Brad.

The sheer volume of what’s thrown at us here is quite a shock to the system and the result could easily be basic and exploitative TV, but Shahi makes us believe in Billie’s needs enough for this to work as a drama. She’s equally adept at all the smouldering glances and sweaty bedroom encounters the show requires, and that combination allowed the show to run for two years before Netflix cancelled it. (Two series)

Footballers’ Wives (ITVX)

‘I can’t believe I did some of those sex scenes – I’d never do that now. I was semi-naked most of the time… Oh my word, there was a plane scene so explicit it was like porn.’ That was Zoe Lucker, reflecting on her time in this ludicrously glitzy guilty pleasure filled with bad behaviour. 

It followed three couples based at the fictional Earls Park football club, and there was a lot more action in the bedroom and boardroom than on the pitch. Landing on our screens in a pre-social-media age in which WAGs (footballers’ wives and girlfriends) got more column inches than their partners – think Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Tweedy and Louise Redknapp – it really pushed boundaries for what was acceptable at the time.

In one scene, for example, scheming Tanya Turner (Zöe Lucker) actually bumped off her husband during sex by using his weak heart against him. It’s difficult to imagine this outrageous bonk-fest getting made today. Instead, it evolved into Ted Lasso, a show that is much sweeter and has a lot less sex and drugs – and absolutely zero murders. (Five series)

Bridgerton (Netflix)

The show that put the raunch into Regency drama was determined to push boundaries – and push them it certainly did. Dubbed Bonkerton when it launched in 2020, its explicit sex scenes – up a ladder, in the bath, beneath the stalls at a boxing match, not to mention the orgies – shocked audiences whose raciest experience in the genre up to that point had been the sight of Colin Firth in a damp shirt.

Based on the books by Julia Quinn, it’s set during the swirl of the London social season in 1813, going from ball to ball as the capital’s eligible young men and women circle each other in a high-stakes game of matchmaking. 

It’s produced by US TV powerhouse Shonda Rhimes (Scandal), and can feel more like Gossip Girl than Pride & Prejudice, not just ramping up the sex but also the excessiveness of the clothes, the houses and the romance. At the centre of this are Daphne Bridgerton and the Duke of Hastings (Phoebe Dynevor and Rege-Jean Page), and watching over it all is unseen gossip queen Lady Whistledown (voiced by the great Julie Andrews), whose biting narration accompanies every romantic twist.

It’s worth watching if you like the spectacle of the dresses and balls of period dramas, but aren’t overly beholden to the genre’s traditions. No wonder it became Netflix’s biggest hit ever, with 82 million households tuning in the first few weeks alone. (Three series)

Industry (BBC iPlayer)

This exhilarating drama is set in the toxic world of high finance in the City of London – and that means indulging in a huge amount of drug-taking and sex. There’s certainly no shortage of the last element here, and the show pushed the envelope for BBC audiences when it came to how it dealt with bedroom kinks on screen (too rude to print here), especially in series one and three.

It’s set at fictional bank Pierpoint & Co, where a group of recent graduates, both British and American, are keen to make a name for themselves. Brits Harry Lawtey (You & Me) and Marisa Abela (Back To Black) lead the cast of bright young things who are sucked in by the promise of big money – but soon find that the ‘greed is good’ culture has its inevitable dark side.

The unlikeable cohort of young bankers are even more hedonistic to offset the cut-throat office antics in series two, when Pierpoint’s employees return to the trading floor after the pandemic to find that the London and New York teams have been pitted against each other in a fight for survival.

For the third series, Game Of Thrones’ Kit Harington joins the cast as the CEO of a green tech company who has some surprising sexual preferences – brace yourselves for the shower scene. (Three series)

Euphoria (Sky/Now)

The graphic bedroom scenes in this controversial and award-laden drama feel genuinely shocking – blending sex, violence and drugs together into a borderline pornographic blizzard of trauma and nudity. Slick, topical and powerful, it follows a teenage girl’s struggle to remain sober after returning from rehab and to pull all this off without it feeling too exploitative you need great actors.

Best of the lot is Zendaya as the lead character Rue Bennett, whose fight to re-find her place in the world forms the core thread of the two series so far as well as a window into the almost equally messed-up lives of her teenaged friends (including Cassie Howard, played by Sydney Sweeney) in the fictional Californian town of East Highland. Zendaya and Sweeney are both top actresses now and Euphoria was a star-making show all round – look out for Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi in there, too. A long delayed third series is on the way. (Two series)

The Great (Channel 4)

There are plenty of raunchy scenes (the make-up sex over the breakfast table will certainly wake you up) and a glorious minimum of attention to historical fact in this darkly funny and frequently outrageous comedy drama charting the rise of Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) from reluctant bride of the barking and dangerous Peter III (Nicholas Hoult) to sole ruler of Russia. 

Not only do they put the woman in the driving seat – especially when Catherine imprisons Peter as her sex slave – but they’re also rather funny which is something so many shows forget to portray when it comes to sex, so that feels surprising, too, especially in a show set in the past.

Full of plots, schemes, beautiful period costumes, slapstick and very black humour as well as the sex, the first two series saw Fanning and Hoult nominated for Emmys and the third shows no dip in quality as the chirpy Catherine continues to plot to remove Peter from power and drag Russia kicking and screaming into the light of the 18th century. 

The Great is based on a play by Tony McNamara, who was also behind the similar 2018 movie The Favourite – and the very dissimilar Aussie medical romcom series The Heart Guy. (Three series)

Disclaimer (Apple TV+)

Two teenage backpackers are caught in flagrante by the guard as they engage in passionate sex in a sleeper car en route to Venice in the racy opening scene of this winding series from celebrated movie director Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), based on a book by Renée Knight. And it’s a sign of much racier things to come.

Cate Blanchett stars in one of three intertwined storylines as top journalist Catherine, a woman who has a tricky relationship with her son and a secret she’s keeping from her husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen). Jonathan and Sasha, the young couple enjoying themselves in the sleeper car, feature in the most historical of the timelines, and retired teacher Stephen who’s dealing with the death of his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) crosses all three.

Perhaps the raciest scene takes place in episode three in a flashback, where the young Catherine (played by Greta Scacchi’s daughter Leila George) is on holiday when she invites Jonathan for a drink in her hotel restaurant. After flirting with him aggressively, she takes him to her room and guides him through how to pleasure her, culminating in passionate sex. 

Even in a time when we’re quite used to seeing female empowerment in the bedroom on screen, that episode feels like it’s pushing the envelope – certainly on Apple, which isn’t known for its racy content.

The three stories are deeply connected and come together in the manner of a symphony as this high-class series unfolds. Cuarón feels more like a conductor than he does a director here, blending it all into one steadily mesmerising whole.

(Seven episodes) 

Sex And The City (Sky/Now)

Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda were the four women having sex in New York City. Although the show was about far more than their sex lives, it was those scenes that created headlines and challenged norms of what we were used to seeing on screen – most obviously in how graphic they were.

Primarily the show was about the power of their friendship as men came and went – for some of the quartet more frequently than others (Samantha, we mean you!). Clothes and shoes were another big driving force, especially for Carrie, whose wardrobe was about more than aspiration – it was a major expression of her personality.

It was easy for some to be sniffy about such topics as fashion and female empowerment, but the show really didn’t care and remained addictively entertaining – hilarious, honest, witty and sharp – over its award-winning six-series run, even when tackling more meaty topics (such as Samantha’s cancer diagnosis).

After two spin-off movies that didn’t exactly set the world on fire, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon reunited as Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda for the sequel series And Just Like That, but Kim Cattrall’s Samantha was otherwise occupied in Europe and couldn’t join them for brunch, one phone call aside – in other words, Cattrall said no. (Six series)

Outlander (Netflix)

Yes it’s a romantic period drama, but Outlander is also very graphic, especially in its early series, and has featured a number of shocking scenes of sexual violence as well as very torrid consensual sex. It’s mostly seen through the female’s eyes, which makes it saucy and sweaty and primal as well as empowering.

The two lovers are Claire (Caitriona Balfe), a former nurse in 1945 who finds herself thrown back in time to 18th-century Scotland where she falls in love with a highlander, Jamie (Sam Heughan). They’re caught up in the Jacobite rebellion – and their racy adventures have taken them to Paris, the New World and back to Scotland.

For the genre, the show has definitely pushed the limits of what we’re used to seeing, but in a different way to the likes of bonkfests such as Bridgerton or The Tudors (see below). There’s something quite dangerous at the core of it all but it can also be unusually raw and gentle when it comes to the bedroom scenes. Those can feel bold in their intimacy, too.

It’s been a hugely popular journey – according to the Scottish government, Outlander was a key factor in the number of tourists visiting Scotland hitting record levels in 2017. The latest run of episodes – the back half of series seven – finds them in Scotland and, even if the show doesn’t have quite the excitement it did back at the start, it’s still good to follow this couple’s journey through thick and thin. (Seven series)

True Blood (Sky/Now)

Vampires, mystery and passion fill the swamps of Louisiana in this HBO show, which took full advantage of its fantasy setting to give us plenty of boundary-pushing bedroom moments, including one memorably shocking scene in which waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and brooding 174-year-old vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) became very friendly with each other in a cemetery after he’d just risen from the grave.

Across seven spooky and steamy series, this show marries the supernatural and the dramatically romantic to excellent effect, creating a world where the existence of vampires is known to the general public as the vamps – now able to sate their thirst with an artificial drink named Tru Blood – try to live among them.

Smart and steamy, it trades initially off the chemistry between the excellent Paquin and Moyer, but swiftly expands its scope to other folks in the small town of Bon Temps, and the wider supernatural world in general. 

Fans of The Vampire Diaries as well as the Twilight movie franchise will find lots to sink their teeth into here and, when it comes to matters of the bedroom, True Blood feels keen to go one step beyond its competitors in what it will show on screen. (Seven series)

Sense8 (Netflix)

This beautifully made science-fiction drama explored sex in a way we haven’t really seen before on screen. It’s the story of eight people across the globe who are emotionally and telepathically connected, known as ‘sensates’, and the links between them – they can see each other’s thoughts and feel each other’s pain – allowed them to indulge in all kinds of physical interactions over distance.

If you love shows like Lost, where the answer to the mystery always seems to be just one more episode away, this may be for you as we gradually discover over the two series and finale film just how the ‘sensates’ are linked – which is good as there are plenty of baddies to fight. (Two series and a film)