The Man Who Filmed Everything

Netflix’s The Naked Director (全裸監督) is based on the real story of Toru Muranishi, who transformed Japan’s adult video industry in the 1980s from a grey-market cottage operation into something resembling a legitimate—or at least legible—commercial enterprise. Takayuki Yamada plays him as a man of almost deranged conviction, the kind who mistakes his appetites for a philosophy. The show works as period drama, business drama, and occasionally outright satire of Japanese corporate culture, all wound around sex scenes that are explicit by prestige TV standards and tonally genuinely strange. It never quite settles on whether Muranishi was a visionary or a predator, probably because the honest answer is both, and the show is too smart to resolve that tension into something cleaner.