Ask Dan & Jennifer

The first reviews of CBS's primetime Swinger series Swingtown are trickling in. As expected, some are great, some are bad, and some are laced with fire and brimstone. Enjoy!

Some are fairly good, like Tom Shales's Washington Post piece, Sex and the Suburb: '70s Lust on CBS's 'Swingtown'

Fair point... after all, why is "Sex in the City" ok, but swinging / threesomes bad?

And Mary McNamara from the Los Angeles Times has makes a great point: 'Swingtown' harks back to a time when sex was sexy. She says Swingtown "serves as a bracing reminder of a time when American adults actually considered sex recreational and, gasp, fun." Well said!

Some are not exactly starry... saying the show is OK but not necessarily anything too special or great. There are the somewhat ignorant / uninformed opinions as well, many focusing on the rampant drug use - which was merely a fact of the times, nothing to do with swinging or threesomes.

Then there are more poorly informed opinions...
Such as "ah, the 70's, when people had sex with their neighbors". Huh? Swinging has never been more popular than it is today, where adult online dating makes it possible for consenting adults interested in swinging, threesomes, or just plain sex, can choose from millions and millions of other like minded adults, without having to drive to a seedy adult bookstore on the other side of town.

And of course the ever judgmental religious extremist zealot camp couldn't be too far behind.
Their traditional perspective of "everything that's different from my morals, a.k.a. religious beliefs, must be evil and sacrilegious, and hey, let's just burn the non-believers" stays true to form as always. Here's the religious extremist quote from TownHall, syndicated on Yahoo:

"Marriage is a necessary cornerstone of a civilized society. Crumble that building block and the waves of instability can be felt like tremors foreshadowing an earthquake. Sift through the wreckage of the collapsed mariage, and all too often, you'll find the broken bodies of children. It's never fails to be heartbreaking. Tinseltown thinks that subverting marriage and nuking the nuclear family is all good fun..."

Wow, what drama. From the opening paragraph quoted above, you would think the show was about genocide of children everywhere. Fire and brimstone indeed. These are the people that have no problem with violence, blood, gore, killing, war, but you would think a single nipple would crumble our entire civilization. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Just keep saying that.

And to deal with the factual point lost in all that drama, who exactly said anything against marriage on this show? When? In fact it was just the opposite; these couples featured have stronger and happier relationships - and thus stronger and happier unions/marriages than most. After all, "the couple that plays together, stays together".

The Washington Post's Tom Shales touches on this very point in his own review of SwingTown...

"It's conceivable that "Swingtown" will prompt complaints to the FCC about its relatively explicit sexual depictions. But there's no nudity, and that seems to be the thing that gets those FCC commissioners' panties in a bunch. Perhaps soon, the bureaucratic busybodies will steal away into the night and television will be relieved of what has been an ineffective and hypocritical anti-smut crusade."

Well said indeed.

In the end, people at large will likely watch SwingTown because they want to know what happens next, they want to see who's going to have sex with whom, and how it's going to turn out. The voyeuristic nature of human beings that many try to deny is a strong driving force behind in our culture today. Just look at the incredible growth of blogs, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, reality television, and so on.

What do YOU think?