It's the scene that left a few mouths wide open – quite literally – as another season began for HBO's hit drama Girls.
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The series is acclaimed for offering an honest and incisive take on the neurotic lives and sexual escapades of a group of twenty-something women living in New York; something akin to Sex & The City for a new generation.
But some viewers were taken by surprise when, a few minutes into the fourth season's opening episode that aired on Monday night, they were treated to a sexual move that even Sex & The City avoided demonstrating, even though it was discussed in one episode.
Marnie (Allison Williams) experienced the act in the kitchen courtesy of her boyfriend Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).
On Instagram, Girls creator Lena Dunham even modelled the now-infamous position with her friend and Girls executive producer Jennifer Konner.
A photo posted by Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) on Jan 12, 2015 at 5:19pm PST
Though largely obscured through dim lighting, the scene caught the attention of the Twittersphere and entertainment blogs.
Alison Williams is going to have a difficult time posing the question "Would you like something to eat?" for a very long time.
#GirlsHBO — Randy Baumann WDVE (@DVERandy)
January 13, 2015
Reading about Marnie's opening scene in
#GirlsHBO like
pic.twitter.com/enHcjcdGk5 — Kate Hendricks (@katethewasp)
January 13, 2015
In an earlier interview with Vulture magazine, Williams revealed her efforts to make the scene less uncomfortable to film.
"I grabbed the makeup girl and said, 'I want to smell like a cake,' so we put vanilla cream everywhere so everything smells good," she said.
"And then I'm like, 'Grace, we're going to rig something invisible from the side but that feels like a pillow when he puts his face into it.' And, that's what we did!"
The actress also told Entertainment Weekly she would be prepared to manufacture the "engineering achievement" on demand for any fellow thespians should it be required.
"It was so elaborate – it involved Spanx that we cut away and glued down and involved menstrual pads and two of those weird thongs," she explained.
Moss-Bachrach thought the scene may have been inserted as a way for the Girls creator to "put Alison [Williams] through the wringer", though other actors on the show felt it served the storyline and represented a realistic sexual adventure.
For her part, Dunham sympathised with Williams. "She handled [it] with aplomb," Dunham told Vulture.
Directors have typically shied away from depicting such explicit material in primetime, at least until recently. There was a reference in a 2014 episode of US legal drama How to Get Away with Murder, but very little to see visually.
Gay dramedy Looking, also on HBO, featured a similar scene and Nicki Minaj's tribute to the sizeable posterior, Anaconda, contained references to having her salad tossed, another euphemism for the act.
Dunham has copped criticism for going "too far" in the past, including the 2013 episode On All Fours, which contained a graphic and uncomfortable sex scene in which a male character appeared to border on sexual assault.
At the same time, Girls has been applauded for pushing boundaries and inspiring more women to enter comedy and television writing.
