Dear Trudy Janet,
Last night was the season finale of Swingtown, with everyone’s fate left up in the air, and CBS hasn’t said whether or not the show will continue. How am I supposed to cope?
– Mopey in Manhattan

Dear Mopey,
You could start a Jericho-style write-in campaign. Then again, what would you send into CBS HQ instead of peanuts? Cans of Tab? Pet rocks? Quaaludes? When I want to smooth things over with someone, I usually bring over a bowl of Rosy Perfection Salad, but that seems impractical in this instance. In any case, taking action will feel better than being a doormat. It’s not 1954 anymore, you know. Good luck.

Kudos to Janet, by the way, for landing the advice column gig despite every effort to turn it down. (Thanks in no small part to the insistent Henry. Speaking of Henry, those of you who guessed he was gay, good call. Janet seemed surprisingly supportive and unflustered when she found out.) Janet’s first impulse was to play the dutiful wife and support her husband’s decision to move the family to Cincinnati, where his new job awaited. But after a little feminist pep talk from Trina, she did a 180 and decided that, if Roger were really going to take a job 400 miles away, she might not go with him. Wha?!?!?! Roger didn’t help matters much by being a macho jerk and putting his foot down. Again, wha?!?!?! Who are you people, and what have you done with the real Thompsons?

Not that Roger really wants to go to Cincinnati if it means leaving Susan behind. In the episode’s final moments, we learned that Roger couldn’t bring himself to get on the plane to Ohio, that he was holing up in a hotel by the airport, and that Susan (frustrated by her increasing disconnection from Bruce) had gone to meet him there.

But wait, hadn’t Susan just taken the keys of some guy named Tim at Tom’s Labor Day clambake? What happened there? Bruce was sitting on the beach, dumbfounded. The whole thing drove him back into the arms of Melinda, where all the trouble started in the first place. Best scene of the episode was Susan’s earlier confrontation with Melinda, where the two had a frank talk about Bruce (who, at that point, hadn’t actually slept with her yet, despite his obvious lie about the briefcase. All they had done that night he snuck out to see her was talk. Way to wuss out, Swingtown scripters.) Bottom line, as Melinda explained: Bruce felt like Susan didn’t "get him" anymore. As Susan later told Trina, Melinda was probably right about that. Still, it’s been clear all season that Bruce doesn’t really get Susan anymore, either. Alas, I’m not sure we viewers got enough time to get either of them.

(Read full post)

Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine… Oh, the nostalgic glee that filled my heart when B.J. and Rick broke out the CB radios on last night’s Swingtown. I was wondering when the show would recapture the mid-’70s moment when the CB went from being an unglamorous communication tool for professional truckers to a status-symbol accessory in the station wagons of carpooling moms. (To be followed, of course, by the radar detector, allowing every suburban dad to imagine himself as Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit, outracing and outwitting the law through superior nerve and machinery. But I digress.)

The writers expertly deployed the glorified walkie-talkies in this episode, fittingly titled "Surprise," as a metaphor for all the bungled communications and unexpected revelations taking place here in Swingtown. Starting with the unlikely "handles" the boys chose for themselves: Rick was "Ladykiller" (as if!), and B.J. was "Silver Bullet." (What did that mean? That he kills werewolves? That someday he’ll be a Coors Light drinker, once they introduce the brand in a few years?) Lesson two, after choosing a distinctive CB username: Don’t sit on the mic button, or your friends will hear you reveal that you panicked when an eager girl took off her top, or that you don’t understand what your friend and his almost-girlfriend see in each other, or that said-almost girlfriend is moving to Naperville to live with her aunt, who plans to fight the girl’s cokehead mom for custody.

Sam may not be the only one moving out of town. Roger finally got a job offer for his dream gig, applying his actuarial knowledge to safety assessment for a company building skyscrapers. (Follow that dream, Roger!) Unfortunately, the job’s in Cincinnati. As usual, Roger told Susan but not his own wife. He was still pressing Susan to declare her feelings for him after last week’s kiss, and she she was still resisting, though they were plain on her face. When she finally told Roger that she really wanted him to take the job and move 300 miles away, she couldn’t have sounded more unconvincing.

Janet remained blissfully unaware of the monkey wrench about to be thrown into her potential promotion from office busybody to newspaper advice columnist. Of course, the old Janet would have dropped that opportunity in a heartbeat to be a dutiful wife and rush off to Ohio, but now, blossoming under mentor Henry, I’m not so sure. (Anyone think Henry’s being set up as a possible romantic rival to Roger?) Then again, she still thought Roger and Susan had been spending so much time together just to plan her surprise birthday party. In fact, Roger and Susan made sure to invite lots of Janet’s friends so there would be a buffer to keep them from having to talk to each other. But that plan would backfire in unforeseen ways.

(Read full post)