How Many More Wives?
Ham-fisted references mar CBS' Swingtown
by Jack Newcastle
 I've never been to an orgy, but I can imagine a good rule of thumb is ‘Pace Yourself'; there's a lot of ground to cover and certainly you'll be tempted to cover it all within the first ten minutes. It's the same temptation succumbed to by the creative team behind Swingtown, the CBS summer entry about open marriages in a 1976 Chicago suburb.
Jaws, 8-track tapes, a complaint about the soaring cost of meat, we get all of this in the Swingtown pilot, along with a clip from The $10,000 Pyramid (with who else but Tony Randall as the guest?), and kids scrambling to hide dad's porno mags, and Harvey Wallbangers, and Quaaludes, and coke-snorted through a rolled-up twenty, and ¾ sleeve baseball shirts, and an introduction to a virile and mustachioed airline pilot named Tom, and the blonde stewardess he seduces (named Tammy, natch, as in the old National Airways campaign a ‘I'm Tammy, Fly Me') and, my favorite, no less than a rather grand money shot of a can of Tab, presumably because either Coca-Cola paid a good price for the placement of its iconic 70s product or the prop guy couldn't find a can of Diet Rite at the local bodega. Seeing all these 70s clichés crammed into a forty minute script, I had to ask 'What? No mood rings or Pet Rocks?' but, no, wait, there they were, turning up in the opening credits of episode two.
So, on to the plot. It's the Bicentennial, Fourth of July, 1976, and, along with their teenage kids, still-young-themselves couple Susan and er...(Joe? Bill? Frank? Pick one, I've now watched four episodes and I can't remember the name) are moving to larger digs in a better part of town, and right away we have to ask, who the hell moves on the Fourth of July? And especially the Bicentennial Fourth of July at that? The excitement of the coming celebration began an entire year before. Television was littered with daily history lessons (‘Two hundred years go today, George Washington had a mild case of agita...') people spent months painting fire hydrants and telephone poles - dyeing their poodles - red, white, and blue, a whole big explosive winding of a celebration was planned from coast to coast with sailboats and battleships and fireworks and block parties and parades, and these numbskulls, Susan and...(Steve? Milton? Gary?) decide they just had to, just had to, get a moving van and haul their crap across town on this day of all days. Really? Are these the sort of weirdoes you would invite to a barbecue? Yet, that's exactly neighbors Tom and Trina do.
Oh yes, that's right. Explanation: neighbor Tom is the very same mustachioed Tom Skerritt/William Devane pilot that not only seduced the high-flying Tammy but also took her home to wife Trina for a roll in the sack, for you see, Tom and Trina are also the swing-a-dingiest ringleaders of the set of swingingest swingers in Swingtown and even have the ‘rumpus room' basement to prove it. It's the puritanical Janet - good friend and former neighbor of Susan - who is shocked by the goings-on in that rumpus room, but my first thought was, when swingers swing, and then go home, who cleans up the mess? I mean, is there some sort of service these people call? And even if there were, with half the neighborhood swapping fluids all over your furniture and carpet every weekend, you should think the bills would begin to add up and the whole project would quickly be deemed unprofitable. Again, I don't know squat about the life, but all in all, it sounds very involved and complicated, and more headache than it's worth. Each according to his needs and assets I suppose.
Other doings in Swingtown include the involvement of Susan and...(Al? Winston? Bruce? Bruce! That's it...) Bruce's daughter with her summer school teacher (another gaping hole of logic here. The daughter is supposed to be this great brainiac, seventeen and able to spout rhetoric on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. So why is she in summer school? Well, I guess that's what you get for being born to a family of Fourth of July movers), and then there's a would-be teen runaway befriended by the younger sibling. For readers who weren't around in the 70s, the runaway teen is another 70s cliche. A frequent sight around New York and Hollywood, they were kids who got sick of their parents bourgeois lifestyle and set out to make their own bourgeois lifestyle. According to Afterschool Specials and The ABC Tuesday Night Movie, this life usually centered on eating hamburgers left in restaurants by just as bourgeois but somehow happier families, considering teen prostitution but running off when the first john inevitably turns out to be an overweight, cigar-chomping, middle-aged garment manufacturer in striped boxers, and more often than not, taking the receipt of a ‘Hey you,' by the elderly corner grocer who looked up in time to see that eight-cents worth of apple had just been liberated from his fruit-stand. We don't hear much about teen runaways as we used to, primarily because parents, no matter how much they beg and plead, can't seem to get rid of their kid these days. ‘You're thirty-two years old!' weary mothers now cry. ‘Leave! Time to go! Bye-bye! Shut off the Grand Theft Auto and get out! Oh my God, when is he going to go? My God, Harry, when is he going to go?' That's the problem with kids today: no initiative.
 Though I don't watch more than a few hours television each week, my 70s childhood had me going over to CBS.com to check out Swingtown. It isn't as terribly written as I expected, nor as terribly acted, but for sure it's going to be cancelled. Admittedly, I have no idea what passes for entertainment any more, but I can't imagine how the story line of Susan and Bruce's foray into the swinging world can be stretched out for a few seasons. That's too bad, because I'm kind of looking forward to having The Sex Pistols show up on an episode, or at least having the kid watch that episode of C.P.O Sharkey with The Dickies, and I think it would also be kind of cool to have an episode where the entire cast buys C.B. radios or waits on line for three days to see Hooper. (Because there's nothing like the life of a Hollywood stuntman). Speaking of which, semi-regular appearances by Burt Reynolds seem like a natural extension and would probably generate interest in the show, but perhaps what the producers really need to attract attention is - like in all great 70s shows - a catchphrase. Out of all the lines in the script, personally, my choice would be 'I hope she gives you the crabs.'
Have a bitchin' summer,
Jack Newcastle
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