NYC- Inside a hot, cramped studio in Manhattan, 22-year-old Laura Lee is bumping and grinding in her underwear before a video camera while a pop song blares from a tiny boom box. As the song nears its end, a man tells Lee it’s time to take off her bra. She complies, gyrates topless to the music, and just like that, her audition is over. No, Lee isn’t trying out for a stripper job at Scores. Nor is the pretty young blond, an aspiring actress from Worcester, Pa., vying to be the new Jenna Jameson.
Like a half dozen other hopefuls gathered in the W. 24th St. studio, Lee is simply hoping her naked dancing is deemed worthy to be featured on “Pants-Off Dance-Off,” the cult TV show that’s all about … naked dancing.
Kicking off its second season tonight at 10 on the Fuse cable channel, “Pants-Off Dance-Off” has been deemed “the dumbest show on television” by TV Guide – and it’s a title the interactive game show wears proudly.
“The show is just so much fun,” says actress Jodie Sweetin (Stephanie on the 1987-95 sitcom “Full House”), who serves as an occasional host of “Pants-Off.”
“It’s the kind of show where people accidentally catch it while flipping channels, and then they become addicted. It’s like, ‘Oh, my God! Are they really going to do that?’ It’s a really outrageous train wreck,” adds Sweetin, “and people love that.”
The premise is hardly complicated: Every Tuesday night, five people of both sexes star in their own mini-music video, dancing for about 3 minutes while peeling off their clothes down to their birthday suits. That’s it.
Viewers then vote for their favorites through text messaging (go to www.fuse.tv/upload/pantsoff.php for details).
Contestants earn $200 for appearing on the show, with the highest vote-getter coming home with $600 and a little less than 15 minutes of TV infamy.
Just don’t expect to see any actual nudity. The “videos” end before the money shot, but viewers who log on to the show’s Web site can see the full dance – albeit with all the naughty bits blurred out.
There are plenty of hot bodies among the hundreds of regular folk who send in their photos and videos – often nude – hoping to get on the show. But “Pants-Off” isn’t limited to conventional lookers. The show also has its fair share of fat people, old people and people who really shouldn’t be getting naked for a national TV audience. Which could be the reason viewers have been tuning in since the show debuted early this year.
“The fact they’re real people is the appeal of the show,” says Andy Meyer, Fuse’s director of current series.
“It isn’t about professional strippers. It’s about watching the people you see on the subway, or the street or an office. They’re schoolteachers, sanitation workers and computer programmers, and there’s a fascination with what these people look like naked.”