 The film involved sexual liberation, and featured the (short-lived) desire of the two title couples to engage in extra-marital affairs, mate-swapping and group sex, all of which would have been obviously unacceptable on U.S. broadcast television in 1973.Instead, it made do with plots which were attempts at titillation by the broadcast standards of the time, but which stood a chance of surviving the censors at the network's Division of Standards and Practices.These included skinny dipping, premarital sex, and unmarried couples cohabiting, which were still thought by many to be racy topics for network television at the time.