Playboy Series Makes Move Into the Mainstream : Television: An edited version of the soap opera ‘Eden’ premieres Sunday on the USA Network. The steamy episodes have the same plot twists as the original, minus the nudity.

Both scenes are set in a steamy locker room. In one version, a woman drops her dress and exposes her naked body as she and her equally naked lover writhe on a bench. In the other version, the camera angle changes after she reaches for her dress; all that can be seen of the lovers is a grainy close-up of their faces.

Same show, different TV channels.

In an unprecedented move, the Playboy Channel’s provocative nighttime soap opera “Eden” comes to basic cable Sunday night on the USA Network--but without Playboy’s trademark nudity.

“Eden” is the 26-episode story of a widow, Eve (Barbara Alyn Woods), struggling to keep Eden, the luxury resort left to her by her late husband (Jeff Griggs), who still appears in her dreams. A stipulation in her husband’s will dictates that she must marry within two years or lose Eden. New characters are introduced as visitors to the resort every four episodes.

As a Playboy series, “Eden,” while filled with the traditional soap-opera elements of love, intrigue, lust and deception, also featured something that mainstream shows couldn’t: nudity and simulated sex. For its USA airing, the series will be edited for a mass audience.

“The beauty of this is that Playboy had it at a longer format, and since we need commercials, we have to shorten it anyway--and it’s almost a perfect fit for us,” said David Kenin, executive vice president of programming for USA.

“Eden” began as a co-production between Playboy and a European production company that was interested in presenting an American-style soap opera with European standards, which allow for frontal nudity and many more carnal situations than U.S. network television.

Playboy engaged Henry Stern and Stephen Black, writer-producers who had worked on “Flamingo Road,” “Falcon Crest” and “Knots Landing,” to develop such a show. “Eden,” shot at the Las Hadas resort in Manzanillo, Mexico, premiered last November.

“Nothing we show is X-rated,” said Tony Lynn, president of Playboy Entertainment Group in Los Angeles. “Our self-produced shows are not rated, but they would fall somewhere between an R and an NC-17 rating.”

Production had already begun when Kenin approached Lynn about running an edited version of the series on USA. So the first eight episodes were shot without consideration for editing, and in order to delete the more explicit scenes without hurting the plot, some scenes--such as the lovers in the locker room--were enlarged, to take the nudity out of the frame.

“We shot everything one way, but edited two versions,” Black said. “But by the ninth episode we knew what was going on and we started writing (subsequent shows) so that important plot points were not stated when a woman’s breast was showing, and made a specific point of not putting the saline plot points where the visual had to be cut out.”

What USA wants edited, Kenin said, is “full-frontal nudity, some sexuality, anything too overt, which is usually a simulated thing anyway. What we are doing is basically taking it from an R to a PG.”

The producers say they can live with the changes. “The stories hung together without the extra eroticism that is in the Playboy version,” Stern said. “It’s still pretty hot and sexy for USA.”

Meanwhile, the Playboy version of “Eden” is airing in Germany, Holland, Spain, Italy and other countries.

“They don’t mind seeing breasts. They don’t like seeing people shot, with blood pouring out of them,” Stern said. “We have a different value system. We can let a 6-year-old see dead bodies all over the place but not people making love.”

USA has scheduled “Eden” Mondays through Thursdays at 11 p.m., where, Kenin said, the network hopes it will provide effective counterprogramming for the news, talk and comedy shows that dominate the late-night time period. On Sunday, however, it premieres as a two-hour movie at 8 p.m. On Playboy, new half-hour episodes premiere every other Saturday at 9 p.m.

“The one thing about the show airing on USA,” Stern said, “is that if people want to see the whole show, they can tune into Playboy. So it works for both networks.”