CBS' wife-swapping 'Swingtown' a saucy '70s period drama

Staid, stodgy, predictable CBS, the self-proclaimed Tiffany network, is feeling frisky and going experimental this summer - like a freshly committed '70s swinger with a brand-new copy of "The Joy of Sex."

"Swingtown" debuts at 9 p.m. today on WBBM Channel 2. In style and attitude, it's a classically frothy summer replacement series. Yet in many other ways it's unlike anything seen on TV - at least on CBS - as it returns to those glorious, wipe-swapping days of yesteryear, specifically that bicentennial summer of 1976 in Chicago's own North shore community of Winnetka, where evidently times ran much higher than the children were led to believe.

One of those children, however, just happens to be blowing the whistle on that scene. Writer-creator Mike Kelley grew up in Winnetka, where he was 8 in the summer of '76. While he admits to using "a lot of license" in developing the series, at the same time he insists there's more than a germ of truth to it.

"My parents threw some pretty fabulous parties, and they had a lot of interesting friends, and I saw some risque things from the top of the stairs," Kelley says on the phone from Southern California, where he's putting the finishing touches on the show's 13-episode summer run. "I would say most of the stories are from my imagination and were inspired by real events."

His mother told The New York Times she didn't remember any orgies like the one depicted in tonight's pilot. (An unsuspecting woman walks in on it and receives the invitation: "Why don't you kick off your shoes, Mom, and join the party?") But there's no denying the drug use and, yes, the wife-swapping are emblematic of the age and the excesses of the Me Decade.

The pertinent question is, what do Kelley and co-creator Alan Poul make of them dramatically? The show opens playfully with a shot mimicking oral sex, as a woman kneels in front of a man - a pilot in a cockpit, actually. She moves to reveal she's really just swabbing a stain on his shirt after spilling coffee on him. Then the show unveils its true intent.

"Your wife's gonna kill me," says the apologetic stewardess.

"My wife," purrs the pilot, "is going to love you."

Cut to the three of them in bed and the wife telling her husband and newfound friend to "carry on" as she goes to get something to drink.

Grant Show of "Melrose Place" dons a full '70s mustache to play Tom Decker, the pilot, and Lana Parrilla sports a Dorothy Hamill wedge haircut as Trina, his ex-stewardess wife. They're devoted swingers, and they sense fresh meat when Molly Parker of "Deadwood" and Jack Davenport move in across the street as Susan and Bruce Miller. The Millers have two kids, the sexually precocious Laurie, played by Shanna Collins, and the more timid younger son, B.J., who would seem to be the Kelley equivalent as played by Aaron Christian Howles. That's where things get complicated - yes, even more complicated than sharing a marriage bed.

"Swingtown" is undeniably tawdry and titillating to start, but Kelley intends for it to also have a heart. "It's all very personal," he admits, especially compared to "Providence," "The O.C." and "Jericho," the more formulaic network shows he previously worked on. "This is kind of my 'Wonder Years,'" he adds, albeit "The Wonder Years" crossed with "Boogie Nights."

The show explores not just the parents' shifting attitudes toward sex, but those of the kids as well. Laurie finds herself more turned on by her AP Philosophy summer-school teacher than by her burnout boyfriend, while B.J. is mystified by Penthouse only to discover there can be painful repercussions to treating girls as the objects of sport. And class - TV's true taboo topic - enters into the adult world, as the Millers are moving up from a more low-class neighborhood and leaving behind their old best friends, the Thompsons. (Miriam Shor's Janet Thompson is the one who walks in disapprovingly on the orgy.) The three couples will soon go off to Door County in an episode Kelley considers "almost an adult 'Breakfast Club.'"

Kelley calls the mix of generations "the true adolescents and what I consider the resurgent adolescents," in that the parents of that generation were experiencing a belated coming-of-age of their own. "They got married out of high school or college, and they didn't have the opportunity to really explore relationships," he says. "The culture got permissive, and their marriages hit critical mass."

In many ways, the kids in "Swingtown," having grown up in an era of sex ed, are more sexually sophisticated than their parents, something cast in relief when Laurie sasses her mom that "I get that I'm the same age as you were when Dad knocked you up, but there's nothing to worry about. I'm smarter than that."

When I suggest that makes "Swingtown" sort of AMC's early '60s period drama "Mad Men" only 15 years later, Kelley says, "That's a lovely company to put us in."

Lovely and, at this point, perhaps a little premature. "Swingtown" isn't quite as good or as stylish as "Mad Men." It is, again, tawdry and titillating by turns, and I remain skeptical about whether Kelley can mix heart into the sexcapades without making it treacly as well.

Yet there's no denying it's a bold move for CBS, as bold as a couple "opening up" their marriage. The show has found a surprising advocate, however, in CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler, who turned out to be related to the couple who wrote the original '70s swap bible, "Open Marriage." She committed to the show a year ago, and while it was first scheduled for midseason last winter, Kelley agrees the delayed launch "in retrospect" is "a blessing," in that the series does have an airy, flittering, summer-breeze feel to it, fueled by the '70s soundtrack. Kelley specifies most of the songs in his scripts, but he also draws on an old contact as Liz Phair, a friend of his since grade school (and well known for her own sexually provocative material), recorded the incidental filler music.

For now, "Swingtown" is being shot in Hollywood, where they've found some elm-lined streets and constructed stand-ins for Winnetka's post office and train station, but if it succeeds to return for another season it would no doubt get more of a budget for location shooting.

"That's our intention in success," Kelley says, "to go back and pick up as much location shooting as we can."

Does it deserve it? For now, I'll say "Swingtown" is more interesting as a curiosity - especially on CBS - than it is successful, but it is also genuinely daring, most notably in the way it refuses to judge or punish the characters for their deeds, a traditional hallmark of prime-time TV. I think most viewers will be surprised if not shocked: not by the sex or drug use, which are pretty routine by TV standards, but by the note of liberation the pilot ends on.

"I never set out to judge any of these characters or make this a morality tale or a cautionary tale," Kelley says. "It was a moment of exploration and sexual freedom. We're not commenting at all, morality-wise, on the choices these people make."

Hey, what generation could ask to be judged any more fairly by its offspring?

Ted Cox (tcox@dailyherald.com) writes Tuesday and Thursday in L&E, Friday in sports and Friday in Time out!