Bravo's Summer House Likes Bare (Male) Butts and It Can Not Lie

This post contains screencaps of bare bums as seen on Bravo's Summer House. You've been warned.

It was very easy to be guarded about Summer House, the Bravo docu-drama about a group of Manhattanite young professionals (i.e. branding managers and PR flacks) who spend their summer weekending at a beautiful (but somewhat restrained, for Bravo's standards) Montauk house, complete with a pool, a pantry big enough for canoodling, and night-vision cameras in every bedroom, just in case. Filmed every Summer for the past four years, Bravo airs the show in the wintertime, which comes across as half-taunting and half-aspirational. It's infuriating to watch these young chuckleheads enjoying summer's bounty, but it's also oddly comforting. It's power-down TV for your weeknight spent on the couch. It's also got the best televised nudity on all of basic cable, and it's time we all stood up and applauded that.

In the trailer for the new season of Summer House, we're not 30 seconds into the preview before the tanned, blond, kinda dumb guy is slapping the tall, dark-haired dreamboat who you should never willingly date with a frat paddle, right on Tall, Dark, and Bad News' exposed butt. Season 4 has officially begun.

Televised nudity is nothing new. Premium cable channels have broken down all the possible barriers that ever existed when it comes to nudity. Still, there is something quaint and cute and comforting about the way Summer House does nudity. This is no HBO boobs-and-gore gratuitousness. The nudity is in fact rarely sexual, and rarely female. It's a lot of casual male butt, to be quite honest, and when you're looking for comfort television, casual male butt can be just what the doctor ordered.

Most of the casual male butt in Summer House belongs to Carl Radke, an American hero in the field of gettin' them cheeks out. Carl's gone on quite a journey through the show's first three seasons, from regrettable f*ckboy dating/cheating on Amazonian twin Lauren, to overstressed working man obsessed with hitting his sales quotas, to getting run around the house last season by Paige. At each turn, though, Carl made sure the cameras got a good look at his bum. Sometimes the bum was a getting-dressed-for-the-evening bum, a promising bum that looked optimistically towards the night's festivities. Sometimes it was a bum of comraderie, as he and his fellow butt-showin' housemate Kyle went ass-out for the cameras. Sometimes it was a bum of apology, after having misbehaved in some way and thus deciding to show butt to get the audience back on his side. However it got deployed, it pretty much always worked. Carl's got the roguish personality (and body) to sell it.

The butts on display on Summer House aren't all just Carl, of course, even if he's the LeBron James of uncovered booty. Kyle is always good for some bum, though his is a more one-dimensional bum, almost always deployed during some drunken shenanigans or another. On rarer occasions, Kyle's is the one Summer House butt that will come into play for sexual situations, with his fiancee Amanda.

Last season, the peculiar Jordan joined the house, and in the midst of nobody quite knowing what his particular damage was (a virgin? Closeted gay?), he still managed to show the audience his best side.

Do the butts make Summer House a better show? Not substantively, I suppose. But they help set the vibe of the casual summer vacation home, where the warm breeze glides through open windows and doors and seems to encourage a care-free attitude about things like clothes or modesty. Kudos to Summer House for another season of silly drunk brand managers and their night-bum activities.

Summer House returns with its fourth season premiere Wednesday February 5th at 9:00 PM ET on Bravo.

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Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.