Letters to the Editor
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thanks
I'm glad to know I can safely skip Swingtown. If you make a show about sex that is neither sexy nor funny, what's the point? The Wonder Years meets The Ice Storm??
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Sorry but,
Morgan Spurlock is the most annoying man alive. It's a shame that someone like him has to front such a seemingly interesting program.
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Ugh.
I'd bet good money that SWINGTOWN won't be half as good as any of COLD CASE's expert 70's recreations.
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Speaking of "savings," better to save the snarkiness.
There will be plenty of targets of opportunity for Havrilesky to sneer and dismiss this summer, and for once it will be appropriate. Perhaps because of the anarchy the writer's strike caused, the development execs at the megacorporations must have told their twenty-something creative staffs to produce something like the "summer replacement shows" of the 1960's. Only those young people never saw such shows. Swingtown is only the first attempt of these blind young men to build an elephant.
Just a few of the titles will make it clear what we'll be facing. I Survived a Japanese Game Show. Wipeout, which is an imitation of a Japanese game show (specifically Ninja Warrior on the G4 non-network). High School Musical: Summer Session, for those who haven't died from excessive vomiting due to the the real HSM phenomena. Last Comic Standing, with the dying business of stand-up comedy trying to produce young, clean, airable comics that aren't copies of existing acts.
Unless somebody actually, deliberately gets killed on camera on one of these shows (maybe The Mole would be a good place for this to happen) nothing will be worth watching on network TV this summer. Makes the old summer series like The Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour and the "playhouse" programs featuring busted pilots, the summer fare of a few decades ago, look like paradise by comparison.
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The Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour?!?!
Dude, I just had an acid flashback!
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"Swingtown" will fail. . .
. . . unless it was written by people in the lifestyle, or very closely supervised by same. The tendency of straight people is to regard swinging as a purely hedonistic activity, selfishly pursued. That's wrong.
The fundamental concept requires honesty between the partners, and generosity over jealousy, the latter subsiding once one realizes that the fundamental commitment to the couplehood is solid. The only two remaining issues are style and degree of emotional openness to others, which vary widely.
But the cement that holds it all together is the awareness that human beings are not a sexually monogamous species, but they bond closely as couples. The logic is overwhelming that "swinging", or polyamory, as some of us call it, is the design for sexual interaction among human beings that nature intended.
If the writers of "Swingtown" don't understand these things and make cheap entertainment out of the subject, they will be making the same mistake the straight filmmakers did with gays before "Boys In the Band": they will perpetuate misunderstanding, intolerance, and a lot of bad legislation.
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Swingtown
There was an article about this show in The New York Times recently. The people who created the show originally had hoped to sell it to HBO. The script eventually got to Nina Tassler, the programming vp at CBS. Her cousin wrote a book called OPEN MARRIAGE, so she was willing to read the script. Then she decided that with some judicious editing (i.e., the nudity) it might work on CBS. One of the show's creators, Mike Kelly, is basing it on his recollections of growing up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1970s.
Frankly, I'm intrigued by the cast: Molly Parker, Jack Davenport, Miriam Shor, Josh Hopkins and Grant Show. It has potential. I just hope the network commits to running ALL of the episodes over the summer and doesn't cancel it quickly.
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I like Morgan Spurlock
and the few eps I saw of "30 Days." The minute-man vs. migrant from Mexico one was especially moving and relevant.
At least the dude is trying...it's more than I can say for Denise Richards, Lindsey Lohan's mom, all of CNN, the networks...I'm tired now; must nap...
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I already detest Swingtown
I'm prepared to hate this show and do to them what the housewife almost did to Married with Children - write letters to CBS and to sponsors, and to every rightwing wacko group in existence - letters so poignant ( this show would have killed grandma!) it will be a cautionary tale of what never again to try on network TV. ( And of course, I'll be taping it for the MILF and the quarterback pool scenes and the anachronistic non-threatening dark-skinned foreign exchange student and the PTA prexy. But I'll still loathe it. Taping a show and hating it are not mutually exclusive. Taping Ally McBeal and Sex in the City for the " naughty parts " got me through 1998-2001.) Seriously, though isn't this just a souped-up What about Brian, October Road, How I Married your Mother knockoff transposed to the 70's for Boomer nostalgia? I can see this Big Concept or whatever a parsec away. I'm so glad the Hoffaesque Writers Guild went to war and gutted the TV industry to bring us this dreck. Rock on, ***wipes!
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The Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour
A--h--h--h--h--h--h--h YES!
Cab? Cab? Taxicab!
Have you been washed in the blood of the lamb?
I've tried everything.
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@DouglasWilson a couple of points to consider
. . . unless it was written by people in the lifestyle, or very closely supervised by same. The tendency of straight people is to regard swinging as a purely hedonistic activity, selfishly pursued. That's wrong.
First point: this show is supposed to be dramatic and entertaining, and prolonged heartfelt discussions of the politics of polyamory are not generally dramatic or entertaining.
Second point: I seem to recall that Usenet geeks more or less invented the politics of polyamory online in the eighties and nineties.
There was no such politics in the seventies. It was just hedonism and self-indulgence people had on their minds back then.
The sixties generation suffered through the assassinations of RFK and MLKII, and the Hells Angels anti-Woodstocking of Altamount, and the Nixon ascendancy and the War on Weed become a Major Federal Project and then we pulled out of Vietnam and there weren't even any more antiwar demonstrations you could go to.
The hippie free spirit was bent into sex, coke and Qaalude hedonism much like the captive Elves were traumatized and turned into Orcs by Sauron.
Tee hee.
No seriously, things soured in the seventies, the politics of polyamory hadn't been invented yet, and there was a lot of degradation and drama.
That's partly how we ended up with the Reagan backlash.