"Swingtown" the latest cbs sitcom displays American decadance

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.htmlTELEVISION


Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours.

By JACQUES STEINBERG

LOS ANGELES: when the television series “Swingtown” has its premiere on June 5, viewers can expect tosee the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smokingpot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes andcocaine; and the sight of the neighborhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how amiddle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of anairline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing thebusinessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street.Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programstend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But “Swingtown,” a one-hour scripted drama,will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like“Murder, She Wrote” and “Touched by an Angel” defined its airwaves, this network tends tobe more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexualexperimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — “Swingtown” is set in themid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself.“Swingtown” was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBSexecutive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the networkwas looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas andmainstream comedies. “Swingtown,” then, is something of a trial balloon.One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on“Without a Trace,” the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to“Swingtown,” would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaseralready on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping tobeckon new viewers without alienating old ones.“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, thepresident of CBS Entertainment and the person who greenlighted the series. “The summergives you a kind of different license.”‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 1 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008In setting the tone for “Swingtown,” its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for “TheOC” and “Jericho”) and Alan Poul (a principal director of “Six Feet Under”) — said theyaimed to combine the raucous abandon of “Boogie Nights,” Paul Thomas Anderson’stongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of “The Wonder Years,”the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing inthe late ’60s and early ’70s.While “Swingtown” does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back onhis childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., theChicago suburb in “Swingtown.” And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by hismemories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fueled parties that his parents and their friends stagedon Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother tookof those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto “Swingtown.” Onecharacter drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr.Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favored and sips gimletmartinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s atNew Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.)Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments arebased on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some ofthe parents in the neighborhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “Itfelt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages brokeup.”In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at herside, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through youngeyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anythingremotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episodetwice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples,most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescentchildren, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages.“A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apartbecause they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to seeyour parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelleyrecalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which isnear Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 2 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.”He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally,personally,” he added.With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelleysaid he has taken their experience to heart.“Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she andher friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I canbe in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think orsay about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me onmarriage and monogamy.”Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had ahandful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deemconventional.”In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as “Swingtown,” Mr. Kelley said, he did notimmediately think of the broadcast networks.Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had adevelopment deal following his run on “Six Feet Under.” HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at leastin part because “Big Love,” which is about polygamy and was already in production, and“Tell Me You Love Me,” a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was indevelopment, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea toShowtime.But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinnercompanion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckierstill, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “OpenMarriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimentingsexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sellnearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.)“I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in mysweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said.“I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’ ”‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 3 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction ofsexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultationwith Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite.“I think we’re able to be more groundbreaking and more culturally subversive by putting thison a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal withthese adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said.Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things everyweek to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing ofclothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than anafternoon soap opera — and far less than “NYPD Blue” had on prime time on ABC in the1990s.Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely toquiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficientlypolluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed ingroups of three, four or more.“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director ofcommunications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog groupthat has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on showsincluding “NYPD Blue” and, recently, “30 Rock.”“It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental toour culture and to our society,” she said.Ms. Henson said she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’recertainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker,who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in“Deadwood” and “Six Feet Under” on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband,Bruce, was in the original British version of “Coupling,” a sex-obsessed comedy.The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of “MelrosePlace,” though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play TomDecker, the pilot.Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 4 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about toembark.“Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertentlyspilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit.“My wife,” Tom says, a smile broadening on his face, “is going to love you.