Swingtown: One of My Prime-Time Non-Guilty Pleasures

For some time now I’ve been meaning to blog about my fondness for Swingtown, a TV show that had an all-too-brief run last summer; it was not surprisingly canceled by CBS due to low ratings (its timeslot on a weekend night couldn’t have helped in that respect) and modern-day petitioning Vice Squads who got their bowels in an uproar. The show may be history, but the characters live on in my head.

Six months ago I bought the 13-episode series on DVD with my Hanukkah gelt (thanks, Grandma!), and I find it oddly comforting to watch a random episode when my own life feels overly complicated, which is much of the time. Not that Swingtown simplifies anything; I just love how the complexities of families and relationships are dealt with so honestly. The series takes place during the summer of 1976, a year I remember just well enough so that I can recognize how spot-on the fashions and set designs are, in a well-to-do suburb of Chicago (I grew up in a similar environment outside New York City). Yet when you discount the feathered hairdos, tight bell-bottom pants, prevalence of orange and earth tones, milk delivered to the door in bottles, Quaaludes, and disco music, the issues raised in Swingtown are far from dated. Interestingly,the children (which includes Mike Kelley, creator of the series) of these disco-era “swingers” are now about the age their Silent Generation parents were during the 1970s, when so many of them opened their marriages or decided that sexual experimentation was not their cup of tea; got divorced or stayed together. Adults of that decade in the U.S., whether they were attracted to or repulsed by that hedonistic, pre-AIDS era, could not ignore it; part of the brilliance of Swingtown was how it showed one ’70s summer through the eyes three very different couples, plus four teenage children, and how it affected all of them in unique ways.

The women characters are the true stars of the series; I can’t decide which one is my favorite because I like all three of them for different reasons. Janet (played by Miriam Shor) is initially the least likeable, most cartoonish character in Swingtown; an uptight, social-climbing, traditionalist housewife who unwittingly drives Roger (Josh Hopkins), her extremely hot yet passive-aggressive husband, to seek solace from her best friend when he is fired from his boring insurance job. However, Janet is the character who comes the greatest psychological distance; by the end of the final episode, you know that whatever happens to her marriage, which is in obvious trouble, she will not only survive but thrive because she turns out to be the true self-sustaining rising feminist of the bunch. Janet’s beautiful best friend, Susan (Molly Parker), is the one I identify with the most because she's an idealist in search of her authentic self; her befuddled husband, Bruce (Jack Davenport), who is moving up in the world as a trader, cannot understand Susan (or their even more idealistic teenage daughter) because he is conservative, literal-minded, and his wife “keeps moving the goalposts” on him. In the very first episode, Susan and Bruce leave their old neighbors, Janet and Roger, behind for digs in a ritzier part of town; their new neighbors and extremely welcoming wagon to a new lifestyle are Tom and Trina Decker, a highly attractive and affluent married couple who throws wild parties that would make Jay Gatsby blush. It is sexy, warm-hearted Trina (Lana Parrilla) who is the most forthright and self-assured of the female characters, and I applaud the writers of Swingtown for depicting her marriage to equally sexy, confident airline pilot Tom (Grant Show) as the most solid of the three. One might’ve expected that Tom and Trina, who are the reason why the series is titled Swingtown, would’ve been crucified in the storyline for having an open marriage and “corrupting” their new neighbors; instead, they turn out to be the couple who is most likely to stay together because they not only truly love each other, they communicate and successfully weather the turbulence that occurs during the series. And perhaps the most underrated relationship in the series is between Tom and Janet; at opposite ends of the social and sexual spectrum, he is genuinely kind to her and bolsters her fragile ego when she most needs it.

Also refreshing is that the series does not hinge on the question of whether or not Susan and Bruce will swing with the Deckers; that issue is resolved during the very first episode, which frees the series to go more interesting places the literal morning after as well as for the rest of that bicentennial summer.

The weakest storylines involve the teenage children: Susan and Bruce’s brilliant yet unattractively smug, borderline anorexic daughter, Laurie, throws herself at her milquetoasty summer-school philosophy teacher, who to his credit won’t sleep with her until after the course is over and takes off for earthquake-damaged Guatemala without her; Laurie’s sweet-tempered younger brother, BJ, is best friends with Janet and Roger’s unfortunately unappealing son, Ricky, until BJ falls in love with his new neighbor Samantha, a pretty, frightened girl who has good reason to be a nervous wreck, as her mother is a cokehead sex addict. (The tentative blossoming romance between BJ and Sam is actually quite poignant, but it’s overshadowed by the message that these kids are basically being neglected while their parents are off swinging and doing drugs.)

It would’ve been nice if HBO or Showtime had picked up Swingtown when CBS pulled the plug; one additional benefit would've taken the form of actual on-camera nudity, instead of orgy scenes that resemble Broadway musical numbers and couple swaps strategically covered by the aqua water in the Deckers’ swimming pool. But all in all, this show was a rare gem, and it’s a heartening sign that prime-time TV took a chance on it at all. How I wish I could transport myself into a medium I generally have no patience for, in order to hang out with Janet and Susan…and join Tom and Trina for a midnight swim, if they decided they liked me in that way.