Swingtown.

Did you watch Swingtown? Network tv's version of Tell Me You Love Me? I watched; my wife was not interested. (Instead she watched the NBA finals. What's wrong with this picture?)

Swingtown was pretty good. Not too much sex. After all, this is network tv. But the entire undercurrent looks promising, could even be fascinating. The idea of a couple of middle-middle classers climbing the social ladder, trying to fit in with the upper-middle classers, acting the way that they act, trying what they try, doing (uh, no pun intended) what they do. And their middle-middle class friends watching on the sidelines in horror. Please, don't let this turn out like Tell Me You Love Me: filled with promise, but ending up too depressing, with few likeable characters. We had DVR'd a bunch of the episodes of that show, and, truth be told, I wasn't that crushed when our DVR died and I missed them. I saw a write up of the finale, and that was ok.

The other thing that I found great were the costumes and sets. True to form, picking up on all of the things that showed the little things in life in the '70s, without making it campy or goofy, like That '70s Show any Will Ferrell movie. Everyone smoking (on airplanes!), the bad wallpaper, a single corded phone, no one wearing seatbelts, kids without helmets on bikes, and, of course, Tab. I don't know what it is - I don't go for period pieces, but when a show or a movie brings to life the little bits of life during a time frame, it makes it far more entertaining for me. Those were a couple of things that made Rome and Shakespeare in Love engrossing for me. Ok, the 1970s in middle class America is wildly different from turn of the first millennium Rome or England in the 1500s, but same idea. When a set and costume designer makes you feel like you really are watching something from the time period, without making the issue over the top, it adds a lot to the show for me.