'Swingtown' swirls gently down the drain

I'm not usually the kind of guy to say, "I told you so." Well, that's not exactly true. Actually, I am the kind of guy who delights in saying, "I told you so you and you were a fool to doubt me and you should be clubbed like a baby seal for it, imbecile!" So it is with malicious delight that I note Swingtown, the tepidly smarmy CBS series about '70s wife-swappers, has been all but officially buried by the network. Swingtown debuted in June with a robust audience of 8.6 million viewers. "My guess is a lot of the eyeballs drawn to Swingtown were there in search of the explicit sex the show seemed to promise and failed utterly to deliver," I noted at the time.

Guess what? The audience has steadily dwindled to 5.3 million, and now CBS has moved it from Thursday to Friday at 10 p.m., a slot ordinarily occupied by Topo Gigio reruns and old Pia Zadora movies. The peculiarly pointless Flashpoint, a cop show imported CBS from Canada, will move into Swingtown's old spot, but don't get too attached. Flashpoint lost more than a million viewers from its first episode to its second, and will soon be retired to the Canadian Cop Show Hall of Fame with Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.