Swingtown.10-11 p.m. Thursday. WFOR-CBS 4.

Fear Itself.10-11 p.m. Thursday. WTVJ-NBC 6.

Never let it be said that network television ducks the hard questions. Like, what's scarier? Being hung upside down in a barn while an insatiable vampire gorges himself at your throat? Or having group sex while loaded on 'ludes and Gary Wright records?

They'll both make you shudder, but the difference is that NBC's new horror anthology series Fear Itself is supposed to be frightening. The grimness of CBS' Swingtown, a chronicle of 1970s wife-swapping culture, is entirely accidental, a byproduct of its relentless fixation on the decadent and the deviant. They say that if you remember the '60s, you weren't really there; watching Swingtown and remembering the '70s, you'll wish you hadn't been.

Created by Mike Kelley, whose previous projects included The O.C. and Jericho, Swingtown focuses on the moment in the mid-1970s when Middle America started to catch up to the '60s. Drugs and sexual experimentation spread outside hippie communes and college campuses into the suburbs; me-first psychobabble proliferated; the divorce rate rocketed. Sang a melancholic Judy Collins: These are hard times for lovers/everyone wants to be free/Ain't these hard times for lovers/Everyone singing, I gotta be me, without you.

Considerably less melodic or coherent than Collins, Swingtown views the decade through the eyes of a late-thirtyish couple, Susan and Bruce Miller (played by Molly Parker of Deadwood and Jack Davenport of Pirates of the Caribbean), who move to a lakeside Chicago 'burb where within hours neighbors are variously trying to sell them cocaine, Quaaludes or group sex. It's a little like a 1970s version of the scene in It's A Wonderful Life when quaint little Bedford Falls turns into the juke-joint hell of Pottersville during Jimmy Stewart's nightmare.

Or it would be, if Swingtown had either an actor as charming as Stewart or a writer as deft as Frank Capra. But Kelley's compulsive fascination with erratic eroticism turns everything in Swingtown into hypersexualized sleaze. Between poolside wife-swapping, teenage beach bacchanalia and pre-pubescent porn parties, Swingtown is liable to exhaust even the most priapic viewer long before the end of the first episode. By the sixth or so, most viewers may well find themselves rooting for the herpes virus.

Fear Itself is another kettle of fish, or vampires. A slightly toned-down version of the Masters of Horror series on Showtime a few years back, each episode is crafted by a different veteran of the genre, from John Landis (An American Werewolf in London) to Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) to Darren Bousman (the Saw series).

With so many different directors and writers involved, it's always hard to judge where anthology series may be going. But the first two episodes of Fear Itself are good, goosebumpy fun, with the deft set-ups, rousing action and surprise endings of a comic book. In Thursday's episode, written by Mick Garris (The Fly II), four creepy criminals lost in the woods encounter three even creepier blond sisters. How creepy? They've never even owned cellphones. ''We do not care much for the bonds of modern society,'' explains one. Oh, dear. Sounds like she saw Swingtown.

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