"All Katy wants is to play dress-up while she's at Sesame Street..."
Sometimes, Fanservice gets a bad reaction from certain members of the audience (often Moral Guardians), mainly because children can see it. YMMV on what is age-appropriate for children's television, or television programs in network time slots that have traditionally or once been the preserve of "family-friendly" television programs.
Where this becomes ironic is that if the kids watching are young enough for this trope to be a problem, they likely won't notice a starlet's cleavage in the first place until their parents complain about it. In any case, this reaction is generally the reason for Watershed and Safe Harbor laws.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Blue Gender was originally meant to be played on Toonami (back when it was a daytime pre-teen/teen block), but was moved to [adult swim] because, even after the heavy censorship, Toonami found a handful of episodes too risque. This left Adult Swim viewers with a hackjob that seemed like it belonged on some sort of middle-ground block (even 'what the hell' was edited out).
- The English dub of the fifteenth episode of Digimon Frontier removed a scene showing Zoe in a red bikini. However, it's mostly for the word "sexy" being in the scene in Gratuitous English; we see all the other swimsuits she tried on, and even the scene where she is nearly walked in on while undressing (we see it from the inside; she stops when she hears a noise just before her shirt was about to show some Underboob. This episode arguably had the highest "how did that get left in?" quotient of the franchise. (In fact, most serious contenders for that award are in that season. It was most likely because Disney, which had acquired dub rights via their buyout of Saban Entertainment, couldn't give less of a crap about it, shunting it from Fox Kids to the renamed ABC Family, and their block on UPN stations which had been a spinoff of One Saturday Morning with little promotion.)
- Another case from Digimon Universe: App Monsters, which has a 13-year-old boy in a Shower Scene that shows his nude silhouette from head to toe.
- The anime for Recently, My Sister Is Unusual went through this, originally airing at 10:30 p.m. (which, unlike in other countries where this is past the watershed, is an hour many junior high and high school kids just getting out of Cram School in Japan watch TV during). A media watchdog group took attention to a few risque scenes (particularly one where Hiyori tries to masturbate in Mitsuki's body) and made a public complaint, and the show was moved to 2:00 a.m. shortly after.
- When Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water was rebroadcast on NHK in 2012, a scene in which Nadia's bare breasts were exposed had her nipples airbrushed out for this exact reason, despite the content being fine for the same timeslot in 1990.
- When Tokyo MX replayed the first season of KonoSuba (previously a late-night series) in a Sunday morning timeslot, a particularly fanservice-heavy episode (episode 9) was skipped in favor of a web radio show.
- The first season of Galaxy Angel aired on Satellite and didn't have to worry about this, but starting with Galaxy Angel Z the series moved to a Sunday morning timeslot on TV Tokyo and had to adjust Ranpha and Forte's outfits to cover more skin.
Comic Books
- The Marvel Elseworld comic miniseries X-Men: Phoenix – Legacy of Fire was bumped up from the normal Marvel imprint to the "adult content" Marvel MAX line for the last two of its three issues, after the first issue drew complaints over its very high level of sexualised Fanservice content.
Live-Action TV
- Dancing On Ice. Holly Willoughby (a former underwear model and children's TV presenter) is co-presenter here and got some complaints after turning up for a number of shows in outfits with such low-cuts they raches her stomach. In response to complaints, a later dress was apparently more demure, until she turned around.
- Cavegirl got some complaints for having the main character in a milder form of the "fur bikini"- in a CBBC show.
- Complaints are starting to be levelled at Strictly Come Dancing for female dance outfits that are little more than bikinis with frills.
- The low-cut dress that Katy Perry wore in her appearance on Sesame Street caused enough outcry that her segment was pulled from airing on television, instead having to settle for becoming an internet phenomenon. This trope was likely enforced in a later episode when the famously-busty Sofía Vergara appeared, wearing the most modest church blouse she could find.
- Although Doctor Who has a long tradition of casting gorgeous female companions as "something for the dads", Karen Gillan as Amy Pond attracted some short-lived opprobrium for being too sexy.
It all seemed to start with the miniskirted Police costume (literally a costume - in-universe, she's a kissogram) she wore in her first appearance. How has the production team addressed this issue? They put her back in the same costume for the Christmas Special. Possibly in the spirit of equal opportunity, they also put Arthur Darvill back in his Roman Soldier get-up. Why? Um, they were in the honeymoon suite...
- Amy's legs are practically a character in their own right. Quite deservedly.
- Then they did the Comic Relief special, Space/Time, which is about 14 minutes of just sex jokes, with a good five minutes of the characters discussing Amy's skirt, with Amy flirting with her future self to boot.
- This probably explains why a show that airs at 6 pm on BBC One is instead scheduled to 9 pm in America.
- Sherlock. The BBC received one hundred complaints for the episode "A Scandal in Belgravia", for showing a nude Irene Adler (Lara Pulver), censored only by the scenery and her own limbs/position. Much of the uproar was because the show was aired before the watershed, but it turned out the nude scenes were in fact shown after nine o'clock. It didn't very much to alleviate the ire of the Moral Guardians
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit had an In-Universe example where Moral Guardians were trying to get a show about a 16 year old female cop that dressed provocatively to a later timeslot.
- British children's comedy My Parents Are Aliens caused a stir with an episode called Beauty and the Breast. In which Sophie, an alien posing on Earth as mother and housewife, frets that her human female body isn't exactly right and performs a shape alteration on herself and... you get the picture.
- Scandal had an incident of this occur when the premiere of the Season 4 episode "An Innocent Man" aired right after It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and opened up on protagonist Olivia fantasizing about having sex with two different men. The Parents Television Council compared the incident to "a peep show in the middle of a playground" and actually estimated how long it would take a parent to change the channel compared to the twenty-six seconds between the first sexy shot and the last shot of Charlie Brown. (Which seems a bit obsessive, but hey, who are we to judge?)
- An episode in season 2 of Without a Trace, "Our Sons and Daughters", fell under fire from the Parents Television Council due to a teen orgy scene (which basically amounted to shirtless teens grinding against each other; even daytime syndication edits as of 2015 have left the scene unedited). Somehow the complaints worked, kind of; Eastern-time affiliates that aired the show at 10PM were not fined, while all other time zones that aired the show at 9PM or earlier were fined.
- The Friends episode "The One With The Free Porn" is typically avoided in UK syndication because of this trope. Most stations play Friends before the watershed, and Ofcom considers it to be a show that attracts a large child audience.
Music
- When Britney Spears' "Toxic" video first debuted on MTV, it was in heavy rotation at all hours of the day. However, after the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident that year, MTV restricted the video to only play between the hours of 10pm and 6am, primarily because of the sight of a nude Britney Spears clad in nothing but diamonds in the video.
Video Games
- Moral Guardian Jack Thompson got notoriously annoyed at the fact that a game pitched for a T-rating, Bully, could have the option of making the protagonist bisexual, constituting hardcore gay porn- in a children's game.
- The ending sequence to the PriPara anime was complained about by Japanese parents; particularly due to a female character in a Marilyn Monroe homage being deemed too sexy for a Friday morning kids' cartoon. The original and the new version can be seen here.
Western Animation
- This trope is likely a factor in why She-Ra and the Princesses of Power gave the main character's Super-Powered Alter Ego a much less stripperiffic costume than the original 80s cartoon.
