Well, regardless of the current situation starting to change, we've still gotta ask the question of How Do We Do It?, and to do that we're gonna look at some people who got naked, and some who didn't.
Today's focus will be on something I wanted to do for a long time, but couldn't until just now: The Simpsons. Due to the nature of the show, there are a lot of characters who have differing reasons for their nudity, including some nameless ones. For this one, though, we're sticking to the Simpson Family, minus Maggie since she's a baby.
Homer was portrayed as something of an everyman in the early seasons. He was in over his head, with a job he hated, kids who didn't respect him, and a lazy approach to everything he did. When he did have nude scenes, they used to be about those factors, and always complimented the story. Losing his clothes in "Call of the Simpsons" tied into trying to teach Bart how to survive in the wild, doing so by instructing how to create their own covering. His first nude moment in "Homer Badman" tied into his sexual exploitation case and how people see what they want to see, while his second case showcased how he didn't even have any privacy in the shower. As the series went on, Homer became wackier and louder, and his nudity started becoming the joke in and of itself, as opposed to a segment of it.
Bart was the prankster, America's bad boy. Homer was a hero to the adults of America for representing them, while Bart was a hero to the youth of America for being a rebel to society's standards. He talked back to his elders, he called his father by his first name, and was so much a troublemaker that in "Whacking Day" the school put him on par with bullies like Nelson and locked him in a closet. He even has a whole file of incidents to himself, labeled by name. And part of that included that he, at least in the promotional material, would moon someone. Though, I'd say, at least early on, his nudity was to be portrayed as shocking and part of that rejection of television standards we saw in every aspect of the show in its first years. As things went on, Bart's personality was toned down, but he still had a lot of nude moments, though those were probably just because they were to be expected.
As the first female to be talked about on this show, Marge understandably had the fewest moments in the series. Her character was of a typical housewife, and she was described often as a Plain Jane. Early on, her material was mostly for love purposes, like she'd be naked in bed for the purpose of making love to Homer, and there was one episode where she was in the shower. The transition from the older episodes to the newer episodes started to experiment, likely the result of shows like South Park trying to compete for being the "offensive" show. So to not seem old news, two episodes with larger swaths of Marge nudity were made, "Natural Born Kissers" which showed her butt, and the more conservative "Simpsons Bible Stories" which had her as Eve. "Kissers" was part of the story of Marge and Homer having to make it home while naked, which made it neither humorous nor sexual, but more tense and worrisome, the bigger problem being to avoid being seen naked. As for "Bible Stories", that was more a consequence of her being Eve, since Homer was Adam. Later seasons used her nudity for more sexual purposes, like showing large breasts to an audience, getting peeped on by a robot, and she even started having sex with Homer on a more regular basis.
So if there's a pattern here, it's that the early seasons used nudity for their own purposes, but they did so outside the usual dichotomy of "male nudity = funny, female nudity = sexual", so without further ado, let's talk about the elephant in the room.
Lisa's role is different in the early episodes compared to the new ones, like the other characters. Early Lisa was more a troubled youth, trying to balance her intellectualism with her childish impulses. One episode had her asking for a pony and getting it just to appease a dying relationship between her and her father, another would have her battle sexism with her favorite toy doll. For each episode that saw her engaging in a struggle to better society, there was also an episode where she suffered problems like getting addicted to a hotline for dating "Corey's", or enjoying a theme park. The definitive Lisa episode, "Lisa's Substitute" focused on both these aspects of her to great emotional effect. Of course, as the series went on, Lisa's childishness fell apart and she became more of a hippie liberal, with her becoming a vegetarian, a buddhist, a skeptic over an angel skeleton, expressing difficulty with a rival Republican, and countless other situations that portrayed her as less a child and more a political icon.
So with that said, how do we reconcile these two sides of her? Her childishness is easily represented in having Bart play a prank on her in the bathtub, or skinny-dipping somewhere for its own sake. She'd probably be good for something like a quick gag, something that lasts no more than 5 or 10 seconds. But how does this play out with Modern Lisa? Each character went through changes in how they were portrayed nude to more reflect how society typically uses nudity, so that doesn't bode well for our yellow little girl. The sad truth is that these days, a Lisa Simpson nude scene is impossible to do. Between Yeardley Smith's attachment to the character, Matt Groening's desire to make her look good at all times, Fox restricting what level of nudity is "acceptable" and society saying all nude females are sexual and no one wanting to sexualize children, there are too many factors working against using Lisa for nudity. The one factor I can think of that would work these days is if the family visited a nudist colony, but that goes against the fact that Fox won't allow them to use their best jokes. Back in 98, Fox didn't want them to do "Natural Born Kissers" for having too much nude Marge, and now that they hold more power than ever they can prevent female nudity from being used to that degree ever again.
And in fact, it's possible that the reason the early seasons didn't give us that many naked Lisa scenes were... well, there just wasn't a good opportunity for a perfect joke. Every joke in the early episodes of The Simpsons is meticulously constructed to hit the mark every single time. And each naked moment fit with the characters' personalities. Homer was overwhelmed and never had a moment to himself, and his scenes reflected that. Bart acted outside the norms, so his scenes were also outside what was acceptable at the time. Marge was a housewife, so she was in these positions for lovemaking purposes with her husband. Lisa... forgive me for being blunt, but Lisa doesn't lend herself well to this kind of thing. She wouldn't streak voluntarily, she'd find that too mature. But she's still too young to be used in adult situations, so she needs to do it for childish ones. That doesn't lend itself to many opportunities for nudity humor. I think the main reason the staff didn't give her any nude scenes to begin with is they couldn't find a way to make them into jokes, which is a massive achievement since they could take anything and make it into a joke. Politicians? Yup. Vegetarianism? Yahuh. Conspiracies? Mmmhm. If anything could baffle them, then the task is probably too much to ask for. And now that society's standards have taken over, it's too late to do so now.
So sorry, you can't have your naked Lisa. That is, unless everyone's doing the whole nude thing at once. It's too much to ask for. And considering what isn't too much to ask for, that says a lot.