Take my wife. Please. I’ll take yours.

When the television series Swingtown has its US premiere on June 5, viewers can expect to see the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smoking pot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes and cocaine; and the sight of the neighbourhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how a middle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.

Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of an airline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing the businessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street. Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programs tend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But Swingtown, a one-hour scripted drama, will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel defined its airwaves, this network tends to be more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexual experimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — Swingtown is set in the mid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself, suggests Jacques Steinberg.

Swingtown was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBS executive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the network was looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas and mainstream comedies. Swingtown, then, is something of a trial balloon.

One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on Without a Trace, the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to Swingtown, would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13 episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaser already on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping to beckon new viewers without alienating old ones.



“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment and the person who green-lighted the series. “The summer gives you a kind of different license.”

In setting the tone for Swingtown, its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for The OC and Jericho) and Alan Poul (a principal director of Six Feet Under) — said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of The Wonder Years, the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

While Swingtown does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back on his childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., the Chicago suburb in Swingtown. And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by his memories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fuelled parties that his parents and their friends staged on Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.

When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother took of those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto Swingtown. One character drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr. Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favoured and sips gimlet martinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s at New Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.) Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments are based on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some of the parents in the neighbourhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “It felt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages broke up.”

In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at her side, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through young eyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anything remotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episode twice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples, most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescent children, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages. “A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apart because they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.

Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to see your parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelley recalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which is near Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.” He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally, personally,” he added.

With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelley said he has taken their experience to heart. “Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she and her friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I can be in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think or say about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me on marriage and monogamy.” Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had a handful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deem conventional.”

In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as Swingtown, Mr. Kelley said, he did not immediately think of the broadcast networks. Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had a development deal following his run on Six Feet Under. HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at least in part because Big Love, which is about polygamy and was already in production, and Tell Me You Love Me, a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was in development, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea to Showtime.

But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinner companion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the 1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckier still, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “Open Marriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimenting sexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sell nearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.) “I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in my sweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”

Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said. “I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’” There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultation with Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite. “I think we’re able to be more ground-breaking and more culturally subversive by putting this on a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal with these adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said. Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things every week to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”

What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing of clothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than an afternoon soap opera — and far less than NYPD Blue had on prime time on ABC in the 1990s. Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely to quiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficiently polluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed in groups of three, four or more.

“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on shows including NYPD Blue and, recently, 30 Rock. “It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental to our culture and to our society,” she said. Ms. Henson added she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’re certainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”

None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker, who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in Deadwood and Six Feet Under on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband, Bruce, was in the original British version of Coupling, a sex-obsessed comedy. The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of Melrose Place, though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play Tom Decker, the pilot.

Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about to embark. “Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertently spilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit. “My wife,” Tom says, a smile broadening on his face, “is going to love you.”