2008 Summer Arts Preview

Swingtown

Airs June 5 on CBS

Viewers assuming from the title that yet another ballroom-dancing competition are in for a surprise. The period is 1976; the setting a Chicago suburb home to several married couples finding their place in America's changed post-'60s moral landscape; the "swing" — well, you probably get the point, or will once you see the first party scene of a tangle of marrieds loving the ones they're with in someone's furnished basement. Salacious as it sounds — and surprising as it is that the series was made for CBS — Swingtown is about much more than sexploitation. Focusing on an upwardly mobile couple newly moved into the wealthy 'burb, it's also about class mobility and the strains it puts on old friendships, as well as the generational tension when parents embrace the culture's new freedoms but aren't so sure they want their kids to. It's also, judging by the pilot, flawlessly art-directed, full of well-chosen period music and — for a drama about a country searching for its bearings in its bicentennial year — a lot of fun. If you swing that way, anyway.