Swingtown, the new drama set in the leafy suburbs of Chicago, in 1976, features a lot of free wheelin' Ice Stormy adults-only situations like swinger parties, threesomes, and oral sex jokes. Surprisingly, the damn thing is on CBS, long the well-landscaped, balmy playground of the Olds. So how sexy can it actually be? To hear the producers tell it, it's risque but only in a story-driving way. They're aiming for some mix of Boogie Nights and The Wonder Years. You know, something naughty but with heart. It sounds like the perfect kind of summer show, frothy but also thoughtful enough that you don't feel so guilty about being indoors. So, what have the critics been saying? After the jump are segments from two major reviews, plus a preview video with the show's cast (including Melrose Place's Grant "Jake" Show!)

The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley writes of the show today:

Great sex, like a good deed, never goes unpunished, and there is a melancholy undertone to the series's playfulness. "Swingtown" pokes at the invisible rifts and emotional costs that come with unfettered liberty; in other words, all the consequences that were ignored by self-affirming manifestos that became best sellers in the '70s, like "I'm OK — You're OK" and "Fear of Flying."

The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin was a little less kind:

They say things like "Who's up for a Harvey Wallbanger?" At her Fourth of July party, Trina holds a little box out to Susan and says, "Quaalude?," as if she were offering an Altoid. Susan says she's never had one. "Then I insist," Trina says. "It'll take the edge off." But Susan hasn't indicated that she has an edge, or, if she does, that it needs taking off. This is boilerplate seventies-speak, and it doesn't get at anything beyond itself. AMC's "Mad Men," as punctiliously faithful to the externals of the late fifties and early sixties as "Swingtown" is to the mid-seventies, cracks open the dreams and myths of its time; there's brutality to that show, a willingness to look at the blood pumping through the era's heart of darkness. But "Swingtown" is a little too fond of the seventies to reveal anything about them that we don't already know. ... The characters in "Swingtown" may be going through big personal changes and having, along with their free sex, some rough times, but I envy them: they have to live through the seventies only once.

Sigh. That's too bad. It sounds like it's ambitious but, inevitably, unsuccessful. One wonders what could have happened if it had ended up at HBO, as originally conceived.