Great song, dubious show, so far.
The new CBS drama series Swingtown, which premiered last night at 10 EDT, makes 1970s America look much freer than it really was. Certainly the premiere episode captures the astonishingly hideous clothing and home furnishing fashions of the time, but its real interest is in, you guessed it, what Preston Sturges referred to as Topic A.
Swingtown doesn’t show us much of the real post-Watergate America, a place of stagflation, overbearing government, appallingly high crime rates, and soon, the ghastly Jimmy Carter years.
But there sure was plenty of sex, the show tells us.
Ah, those were the days!, the premiere episode seems to say, when everyday, ordinary people smoked and drank and did drugs and listened to groovy rock music and swapped spouses. Heady times indeed.
One would hardly imagine that those very same people would vote Ronald Reagan into office in a landslide. Nor would one imagine that the Sexual Revolution that the premiere episode of Swingtown seems to praise so uncritically would result in an avalanche of divorce, illegitimacy, sexually transmitted diseases, family breakdown, and all the rest of its awful consequences we’ve endured as a society over the past three decades.
But why worry about that when you can hope to lure TV audiences with sex and sensationalism?
Swingtown concentrates on a couple of upper-middle-class "swingers" (people who trade spouses sexually with other couples), a more humble couple with traditional values, and a social-climbing pair who decide to try the swinging lifestyle.
Naturally, the latter like it, the original swingers are perfectly happy, and the traditionalists are very unhappy.
The same dynamic applies to the young people in the story, mostly the children of the main couples: the more open-minded and honest they are about sex and the more open to experimentation, the better their lives appear to be in the series premiere episode.
Whether that remains the case in future episodes (I suspect it won’t) will determine how interesting the show will be to contemporary audiences—and whether the producers have any grasp on reality.
Thanks, Nicholas. I agree with your point about The Ice Storm being an all too rare realistic look at the consequences of ideas that lead to damaging behavior. The culture as a whole is a fascinating conversation about such matters, and there is much more to the conversation than the producers of Swingtown have acknowledged so far.
Thanks for another insightful look into the Charybdis of late night TV. I do not know if you have seen or even reviewed The Ice Storm, directed by Ang Lee and starring Toby MacGuire, Kevin Klein, and Sigourny Weaver, among others…anyway, it is a movie version that takes a more realistic look at the effects of the loose living of that era, and the Watergate scandal is being televised and otherwise alluded to in the background throughout the movie. Clearly, the message has to do with the effects of immoral leadership in the family and the nation. There is at least someone out there thinking realistically about the truth that ideers have consequences.