The Deckers have an open marriage and are eager to share it, and each other, with their new, more conventional friends. “It’s not cheating; it’s the opposite, really,” Trina tells Susan, who is shocked that her neighbor is so blasé about infidelity and multiple partners. “Ever since we got into it, Tom and I have reached this whole other level of intimacy,” Trina purrs. “Not to mention the incredible sex.”  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 Millers are torn between the temptations of their new community and the tug of their square old neighbors, Roger Thompson (Josh Hopkins) and his repressed, rigid wife, Janet (Miriam Shor), who bakes, barbecues and is hostile to change of any kind, especially when it comes to sexuality. Except in her dreams.  The Miller parents experiment with childish irresponsibility while their children sample the first fruits of adulthood. Sex is no big deal to Susan’s daughter, Laurie (Shanna Collins), who lectures her mother on her generation’s pill-given freedom, but love is more complicated. She has a crush on her young high school teacher, who encourages her to read Kierkegaard and attend experimental theater, in particular a feminist interpretation of “Waiting for Godot.” And her younger brother, B. J. (Aaron Christian Howles), is intrigued, but confused by a girl next door, the angry daughter of a hard-partying, cocaine-loving mom. All these intertwined tales are told with jaundiced humor but also some compassion, framed by passing allusions to the Vietnam War and Gloria Steinem in her undercover feminist days as a Playboy bunny. “Swingtown” is not as wryly tender as the sitcom “The Wonder Years,” set roughly during the same period, but it’s also not as bleak a look back as Ang Lee’s movie about suburban angst in the ’70s, “The Ice Storm.” It is, however, highly familiar.  Seventies nostalgia has been around at least since the ’90s, and comes in waves. “That ’70s Show,” from 1998, finally ended in 2006, but the epoch hasn’t lost its magnetism, if only because so many of the writers and television executives now running shows and networks were the children of ’70s parents — wide-eyed witnesses to the cultural shifts wrought by women’s liberation, what Tom Wolfe labeled the Me Decade, and the end of the Vietnam War.  ABC’s fall schedule includes “Life on Mars,” a remake of a BBC series about a present-day detective who, after an accident, finds himself time-traveling back to the early ’70s, tracking a serial killer.  Just because an era is amusingly kitsch does not mean it is ripe for dramatic exploration. Period pieces got a boost from the hit AMC series “Mad Men,” set at the twilight of the Eisenhower administration, inside the Madison Avenue advertising world. “Mad Men” reaches back to a period that is almost forgotten and all but forbidden: a time when only white men got ahead, and smoked, drank and fooled around with their secretaries, leaving their wives marooned in the suburbs. The series plays with all the familiar cues of the period — the music, clothes and raffish ambiance — to frame a mystery that holds viewers’ attention; until almost the very end of the debut season it was hard to guess where the story was headed, even though each plot turn was infused with redolent suggestions of the past.  “Swingtown” has ’70s mystique, but not much mystery.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Borrowing a Cup of Sugar (And Maybe a Spouse). Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
On Thursday night, CBS is unveiling “Swingtown,” a drama set in the 1970s that feasts on the comic decadence of the sexual revolution.