Brian Alexander • E-mail

Every year the new television season gets a label. This year there are several, like “Season of the Geeks,” thanks to the NBC series “Chuck” and “The Big Bang Theory” on CBS. But here, we are interested in sex, of course, and that’s why we were so fascinated by how this new, still unfolding, TV season has been dubbed the “Season of Sex.”

“This Fall’s TV Season is Rated X,” announced the Christian Science Monitor.

If the current crop of shows like “Californication,” “Tell Me You Love Me” and “Cathouse” — a reality show set in a legal Nevada brothel — on pay cable, basic cable programs like “Mad Men,” and network offerings such as “Gossip Girl” haven’t convinced you, then soon-to-be-arriving series like the “Sex and the City” rehashes “Cashmere Mafia” and “Lipstick Jungle” ought to make the case. And if you need still more evidence, how about a mid-season replacement from CBS called “Swingtown”? As the name implies, “Swingtown” is about swingers; in this case, swingers living in the suburbs in the mid-1970s, sort of a “That '70s Show” for the parents.

You could argue that every year on TV is the season of sex. But this year the sex gets more graphic and more exploratory, which might make you think that we are becoming ever more perverse and deviant in what we’ll tolerate on TV. However, there is a case to be made that, on the contrary, we’re getting bored — that depictions of sex are now so pervasive, have so drenched the landscape, they are becoming so much white noise.

The new TV season, speculates Mark Andrejevic, an associate professor of communications studies at the University of Iowa, is evidence of a culture “in which the consumption of images of sex as entertainment has become a lot more widespread.” He uses words like “commercialized,” “vapid” and “empty.”

Sex on the menu
The Federal Communications Commission may have conniptions over sexual imagery on TV, those who object to such depictions may be poised with their pens over complaint letters, but many others may find that the whole thing is kind of a yawn.

“‘Tell Me You Love Me’ is a tedious show in which people have sex all the time,” says Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd. “And that, in a way, reflects how people feel about sex now. It is so on the menu that it is like going to a coffee shop or something.”

Clearly, I don’t hang out at the same coffee shops as Lloyd, and other critics have praised the show, but he makes sense. We live in what Lloyd calls “a post-porn world” where sexual content is at everyone’s fingertips. Literally. “You can’t walk 5 feet into our culture without running into a masturbation joke.”

Which may be why “Swingtown” is set in the mid-1970s and “Mad Men” in 1960. Take away the cigarette smoking and the space-age décor of the offices, the permanent waves and A-line flounces of the wives and secretaries, and “Mad Men” (and I do like the show) wouldn’t be all that interesting. Set “Swingtown” in a mythical modern-day neighborhood and you’ve got “Desperate Housewives.”

Andrejevic, who studies TV, especially reality shows, thinks it is possible that “we have become jaded about freedoms, cynical, ironic” and that we may be more “euphoric and wide-eyed” about the days just after the introduction of the birth control pill, a pre-AIDS sweet spot of newness when experimental sex seemed daring rather than fodder for a fashion magazine spread.

There is, he argues, “a certain nostalgia for that period when we were naïve enough to be excited, shocked, moved by things that now seem to us just as jaded and cynical as we are.”

So we enjoy the frisson of the “Mad Men” executives cheating on their wives because we know how naughty it was back then. It seems dangerous and risky. Likewise, “Swingtown” is supposedly (the producers declined to talk to us) meant to explore the era as much as the personal interactions of the characters. We are to be transported back to a time when we might have actually been interested in the fact that our neighbors have sex with other couples, a time before Sens. Larry Craig and David Vitter, a porn-drenched Internet and the shamelessness of reality TV.

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