It’s a classic scenario for a dating show — the nervous shifting, the gulping of champagne — except that when they take their drinks back to the swanky hotel room, the camera crew follows them inside. Within seconds, they are naked and the platinum blonde with a collagen pout whimpers, “Put it inside me” — and the tanned, tattooed beefcake does, in full view of the camera. There are no close-ups of penetration, but what follows is impressively pornographic for a reality TV show.

This is the first sex scene in “Gigolos” — which premiered Thursday night on Showtime and follows five male escorts who service women in Las Vegas — and it’s a graphic sign of our times. These explicit scenes are inserted between reality TV staples like confessional-style interviews and background piano riffs that play up character flaws for laughs. Here we see explicit sex rising to the level of frivolous TV entertainment, and the exhibitionism of reality TV reaching smutty heights. The two genres are increasingly merging, and “Gigolos” is an extreme example of that. As I reported earlier in the week, some of the female clients were allegedly recruited, paid to appear on the show and partook in the men’s services for free. I called it a reminder that “the line between fiction and reality is a very blurry one” — but the same can be said about reality TV and porn.

“It’s the perfect marriage,” Susannah Breslin, a journalist who has covered the porn industry for several years, tells me. “I’ve always seen reality TV as being a lot like porn — it’s emotional porn.” She says both can provide a way “of getting off on other people’s desires or failings” — not to mention their desperation and humiliation. Both thrive on its stars’ self-exposure, which is driven by audiences’ insatiable voyeurism. “The only thing that surprises me is that it took so long,” she says. “This is the beginning of something that I think will be common in just five years. Eventually, the idea of a reality TV show that doesn’t have graphic sex in it will seem antiquated and prudish.”

The overlap itself has been around for a long while — it’s only the near total eclipse found in “Gigolos” that is new. Porn stars like Mary Carey have entered the mainstream by going on reality TV and there are countless contestants on “Flavor of Love” and “Rock of Love” with X-rated pasts. Then there are reality stars that turned to porn when their 15 minutes were up, and those whose private sex tapes were made public only after their turn on, say, “Good Housewives.” And for some celebrities, like Paris Hilton, she of “One Night in Paris” and “The Simple Life” fame, both of which premiered around the same time, the question of which came first, the porn star or the reality star, is a real head-scratcher. Until now, “Cathouse,” HBO’s series about a Vegas brothel, was the most extreme partnering of the two genres.

Mark Kernes of Adult Video News told me in an email that the industry has long flirted with the reality TV concept. The series “Shane’s World” has been a “porn staple” for 15 years and features “recognized porn stars going on a ‘road trip’ to the beach or a ski resort, and while there, having sex with each other,” he says. A more recent series, “College Invasion,” sent porn stars to college campuses to “have sex with each other and (usually) some fraternity boys.” He points out, though, that “pretty much all porn” that isn’t driven by a storyline or plot “is essentially meant to be a sort of ‘reality TV of sex,’ even (or perhaps especially) the tired scenario where the guy comes to the door delivering a pizza, the girl customer can’t pay for it, and sex ensues.” He explains, “Porn thrives on its faux ‘realism'; the idea that any guy could find himself in a situation where an attractive woman wants to have sex with him.”