Yeah, yeah—you love Mad Men, we love Mad Men, everyone loves Mad Men. But I'm going to make a bold statement: The best show on TV isn't the criminally underwatched Mad Men on AMC. It's the criminally underwatched Swingtown on CBS, now released on DVD.

If you’ve stopped crying “Blasphemy!” or composing an angry comment in your head, I’d like to continue. Swingtown, the ratings-deprived CBS drama about swingers in a suburb of Chicago during the 1970s, isn’t as smart or as caustic as Mad Men. Only a show created and run by a seemingly megalomaniac like Matthew Weiner could hope to achieve all of that. But what might elevate Swingtown above Mad Men is the attention to characters that the writers and creator Mike Kelley have brought to the show.

And let's be honest. At some point over the second season, didn’t you feel at least a twinge of frustration or irritation as Matthew Weiner and company played keepaway with the plot? Swingtown, on the other hand, not only manages a sense of humor with its nostalgia, but a surprisingly gimlet-eyed look at relationships.

But more than easy nostalgia (TAB! Deep Throat! Jimmy Carter!) what made Swingtown a stellar entry in television this year is the friendship between female leads Susan, Trina, and Janet. In a post Sex and the City world, watching women navigate female friendships that involve jealousy and class issues is fascinating. After Susan (Molly Parker) moves across town to a tony neighborhood, her best friend, the prim and uptight Janet (Miriam Shor), begins to resent her for the implied slight against what Janet has, even as a wide-eyed and curious Susan drags an unwilling Janet into the '70s. But watching the feminist swinger Trina (Lana Parilla) and Susan's relationship blossom is what makes Swingtown the best show of 2008.

Both women have everything a woman could possibly want, whatever her feminist leanings. Susan has the dutiful husband (an appropriately dense Jack Davenport), two children and an expensive new house; Trina has a high-flying life of Quaaludes, parties, and partner swapping with her dutiful husband Tom (Grant Show, sporting the show’s best visual joke with his porn star’s ‘stache).

But once Susan moves into the house across from Trina, they each sense that they've been missing something out of life. Susan suddenly develops an interest in the outside world (watching her quietly take a stand against her husband by attending a benefit party for Deep Throat's Harry Reams was a series highlight), and Trina finds in Susan the kind of sincerity that makes her life seem a little shallow. But to the credit of the show's creative staff, their friendship moves along slowly, as both women tentatively reach out to one another despite their major differences in outlooks. But watching them grow to need and respect one another is what makes Swingtown so involving, along with secret weapon Molly Parker, who easily gives an Emmy-worthy performance as the woman who's done everything she's supposed to but still wants more.

No doubt the show’s outré premise and its home on the usually staid CBS have prevented it from gaining viewers, but there’s a refreshing richness to the material that’s hard to come by on TV today. And the whole thing (orgies, coke addicts, sex clubs and all) comes without the bitter aftertaste of nihilism that Mad Men leaves you with. If you didn't watch, buy the DVD. The show's future is up in the air, so there might still be a chance to save . What a shame if CBS cancels it, and the only truly great show we're left with takes place in a shadowy Manhattan where everyone has a secret that takes an entire season to divulge.