newcritics

When I told my mom I wanted to hijack the family TV for the premiere of Swingtown, her first two words were: tawdry and cheap.

It wasn’t much of a hijack, anyway; given that the regular TV season has limped to a close, there aren’t many choices on TV, certainly not in new scripted dramas (summer, at least to NBC and ABC, is a sea of new reality shows).

As for tawdry and cheap and Swingtown… well, if only. Swingtown - the tale of a naive family’s exposure to a circle of swinger neighbors in the late seventies - is trying hard; too hard really. Busy, with a large, attractive cast, Swingtown takes the “Boogie Nights” approach to the seventies and sex: drown in period details and a hip soundtrack, add a dash of the forbidden and stir.

One wonders why CBS/Viacom went this route; Swingtown, especially in terms of the sex lives it intends to show, feels more than a little tame - why this series, and the obvious “hard R” nature of its material wouldn’t seem better placed on Viacom’s Showtime mystifies. Probably, like the attempts to transfer the dark series Dexter to network, the parent company is hoping that they can broaden the field of what network can attempt.

That’s admirable, in one sense, but Swingtown may not be the proof people hope for.

The series started tonight as Susan and Bruce, your basic average suburbanites with two kids, prepare to move from their charming subdivision (the “great place for a young family” type) to a better lakefront place nearby. As they prepare for the move we see what they’re getting into: the neighbors, particularly Trina and Tom, the couple across the street, are living an “open marriage” with parties and one night stands.

We also see the two kids of Susan and Bruce: daughter Laurie is playing teenage Lolita games with her summer school philosophy teacher, while despising her lunkheaded boyfriend; son BJ is exploring his own issues with his best friend, as they thumb through Dad’s stashed copies of Penthouse.

And all of this to a soundtrack of sexy, suggestive double entendre selections meant to provide irony from “Golden Years” to “Saturday in the Park” to “Go Your Own Way” and many more (K-Tel presents “Songs From Swingtown” - Order Now!).

If it seems like too much - and I’ve barely scratched the surface of subplots ranging from Susan’s uptight best friend Janet to Trina’s loose living druggie pal Gail - it kind of is. What’s curiouser is that Swingtown doesn’t seem to know exactly what it’s got: the feel for the time period, the kids who seem to be exposed to too much adult thinking and behavior, the adults who personified “Me Decade” obliviousness and a narcissistic interest in personal satisfaction… these things feel right. What doesn’t are the “dirty” parts - something as basic as… whose Dad subscribed to Penthouse, anyway? Playboy was about as racy as suburbia got, as I recall, in terms of what Dad could bring into the house in front of Mom; Penthouse was what you tried to swipe from the 7-11. Or what your friend’s brother had at college.

Such questions extend to the interpersonal relationships: Susan and Bruce’s leap from innocent high school sweethearts to experimentation seems too easy; daughter Laurie’s flirtation with her teacher feels like someone would be calling the authorities. In part, the size and breadth of the storyline is part of the problem: we can’t get to know a lot of these people in depth and motivations become shorthand. In that, the women fare better: though they all have various elements of unreality, all have the period’s dawning feminism as a window into their characters’ lives and their choices (that doesn’t make Susan’s “sensuous woman” journey less forced, but it gives actress Molly Parker something to play to, anyway). The men, though, are largely ciphers. And that’s especially not helpful to Grant Show as Tom, whose swinging guy seems more cliche than real, while Jack Davenport’s Bruce is all but unreadable much of the time. These are not bad actors (Show’s good looks are wasted under the period hair and pornstaches, so it better be about talent, somehow)), and Swingtown has the feel of a prestige project… just not fully cooked.

Creator Mike Kelly (recovering, in part, from Jericho’s demise, it appears) clearly has a lot on his mind, and it would probably help somehow to simplify (start with the score!); somewhere, in the midst of this, isn’t a familiar tale of the illusions of the “sexual revolution” (it’s amazing how creaky the “swinger party” stuff looks and feels), but a more complicated notion of America’s simultaneously prim and exhibitionist notions of sex and sexuality, particularly as it affects kids. That’s brave, and dicey stuff: at times, I was reminded of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides, in a good - and commercially more accessible - way. I’ll be happy to see Swingtown evolve a bit and find an audience… if there’s time for that. I suspect there isn’t, because so far Swingtown looks like an interesting experiment that may not find its legs… or its audience (hint Viacom: they’re still over at Showtime, too). And, I suspect, cheap and tawdry, as my Mom put it, may win the day. More’s the pity.