Oklahoma’s big “TV nudes” scandal was… a Jackie Chan movie on a Samsung streaming service

Since July, the state of Oklahoma has been consumed by important investigative questions, including:

• Why did naked women appear on a state-owned TV set during an official Board of Education meeting? Was someone in the room inadvertently streaming pornography from a personal device to the TV? Will anyone be prosecuted for what happened?
• Were the board members who complained about the video directed by the governor to "lie about me," as the state's pugnacious, hard-right Superintendent of Education asked?
• Why was a "chiropractic table" involved in the scene? And why did the video feature, as one board member noted, a retro vibe and "a guy with a white hat, kind of a Gilligan-type hat"?

We now have answers to all of those questions.

After a lengthy investigation by the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office and the State Bureau of Investigation, and then a lengthy consideration of their reports, the Oklahoma County District Attorney this week announced that "there is insufficient evidence to file criminal charges."

But the investigators confirmed that the complaint was true; a TV in the office did in fact show the images in question, including the "chiropractic table." The naked women did not come from anyone's secret stash of pornography, however; they came from Jackie Chan's 1985 film The Protector.

After this was announced, a local Oklahoma news channel confirmed it by... sitting down and watching the movie. I have helpfully annotated their description with exclamation points to indicate the level of "gonzo" reached by each new entry in the list.

News 4 watched the movie and confirmed it contains several scenes that match the description given by board members, including one where a group of fully nude women [!] work inside a factory [!!] packaging cocaine [!!!], some wearing only lab coats [!!!!].

Another scene shows a fully nude woman giving a man a massage, eventually moving under the table while the dialogue strongly suggests sexual activity.

But why was The Protector showing on a TV in a state office building at all? Investigators came to find out that the Samsung smart TV in question—recently installed in the office—had been set up in such a way that it defaulted to showing Samsung TV Plus Channel 1204, the "Movie Hub Action." (You can see Samsung's full list of TV Plus streaming channels here.) And at the time of the state board meeting, Movie Hub Action was streaming The Protector. How and why the TV was turned on or switched to this streaming channel isn't clear, but the whole thing appears to be an absolutely bizarre accident.

As part of this important investigation, the sheriff's office then took clips from The Protector to the board members who complained. According to the Oklahoma Voice, "The board members, Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage, confirmed to the Sheriff’s Office that the movie was consistent with what they saw on the TV."

Hooking smart TVs up to the Internet looks increasingly like a bad idea, though not usually for the reason found in this case. TV manufacturers have taken what should have been a useful feature and turned it into a way to spy on what you're watching and to push ads to your TV.

Now you can add "showing naked, cocaine-packaging factory workers to Oklahoma Board of Education members" to the list of grievances.