While HBO’s The Chair Company goes some truly bizarre places, as expected from a Tim Robinson feature, episode 5 of the show last night, I won. Zoom in. It had a finale that absolutely no one was expecting. Not a twist in the plot per se, but a twist during the telling of a classic story, A Christmas Carol.
A Christmas Carol was used as a plot point during the episode, where an actor was talking about playing the part of Scrooge in his latest outing. (Sexual content discussion warning from here). The episode ends with Mike giving the story a watch on his TV except…it’s an X-rated version. In it, HBO shows a brief clip of an actual sex act as the last half-second of the episode. Looking at discussion of episode 5 after the fact, despite some major plot developments, it was all anyone could talk about.
One common question was…can HBO even do that? Show something like that?
There are details missing here, like whether that was truly an old X-rated film or something HBO concocted for this. If so, if that was real or some sort of special effect so actors were not actually doing that (HBO rules I could find indicated that actors are not allowed to have actual sex while filming). I tried to image search (the characters, not…you know) using AI and couldn’t come up with anything (it suggested Blackadder’s Christmas Carol with Rowan Atkinson, which this certainly is not).
The topic of sex scenes in film and TV comes up frequently. This has been true over the years, of course, but at present day that involves things like intimacy coordinators. But essentially none of these involve showing a literal sex act. In 2018, a new HBO policy required all sex scenes to involve an intimacy coordinator, and this sort of thing just cannot happen, so I can’t imagine this was something HBO filmed itself.
As for showing something like this, there is little precedent for this sort of thing on HBO. Two decades ago, HBO showed the NC-17 version of Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the famous pornographic film, showing some explicit scenes from the film. The documentary itself was the first movie rated NC-17 that Universal had released in 15 years.
The Chair Company is an MA-rated series, the equivalent of an R-rated movie, and there is no NC-17 equivalent rating for TV guidelines. The episode itself was rated MA with the “nudity, strong sexual content” badge, but that was it.
HBO and Robinson have not commented on the scene, though I expect they might if they’re pressed on it. It is, bizarrely enough, sort of a historic event on HBO, a channel often filled with nudity and sex, but not at this level. And in…The Chair Company, of all shows. But bizarre things you’re not expecting are what the series excels at, and boy, no one was expecting that.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/11/10/the-chair-company-episode-5-ending-can-hbo-do-that/
