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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The trumped-up stories of "Wife Swap" and "Trading Spouses" have less to do with reality than with red mom vs. blue mom culture wars.
Mar 17, 2005 | Even by reality show standards, the off-camera coaching and playing loose with facts in ABC's "Wife Swap," as revealed in Wednesday's New York Times, seems extreme. But for anyone familiar with the show, it can't be that big of a surprise -- we already knew the show went to elaborate lengths to exploit the country's raging culture wars for melodrama.
In its first season, ABC's "Wife Swap " -- along with its doppelgänger, Fox's "Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy" -- has been been the most politically divisive show on television (forget the late "Crossfire," Jon Stewart). Most reality shows traffic in pitting opposite "types" against each other, and usually the conflicts are rooted in issues of class, race, religion or even that snakepit of "family values." None, though, to the extent of "Wife Swap" and "Trading Spouses."
Neither "Wife Swap" nor "Trading Spouses" is a top 20 show, but both do fairly well (especially considering that their audience is probably split), with 10.2 and 7.9 million viewers, respectively, every week. Both play best in the South and the Midwest, while performing poorly in the Northeast and the Pacific Coast. "Wife Swap's" biggest audiences, for example, are in Tulsa, Okla., Louisville, Ky., Oklahoma City, Dallas and Atlanta -- with large ratings gaps between those cities and their blue counterparts. This makes sense, since both shows bathe red-state moms in an earthy, warm glow, while their blue-state counterparts are showered with lukewarm confusion at best, icy negligence at worst. And "Wife Swap," apparently, has no qualms about spinning the truth to make each show as incendiary as possible. According to the Times: "Making a 'swap' ready for prime time can entail withholding facts from the viewer that might muddle the central premise; supplying participants with material to read aloud; rehearsing pivotal confrontations off-screen; and, in some cases, re-enacting events the cameras missed."
"Wife Swap" is a transplanted U.K. show, and it's not at all surprising that the concept originally took off in Britain, where class divisions are notorious and geography (i.e., your native accent) is destiny. ABC shrewdly bought the show concept outright in 2003, but then the jackals at Fox caught wind of "Wife Swap's" anticipated September 2004 debut and slapped their own version together, getting "Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy" on the air a full two months earlier, during the rerun doldrums of July. (In mid-December, ABC announced an $18 million lawsuit against Fox.)
According to forms from the networks, you can apply to ABC to be a "Wife Swap" participant only "if you are a family unit," which is helpfully defined as two parents and children. The Fox application is not billed as an application at all but as a "casting call." "Do you want a new mommy?" it asks, and then the chilling follow-up, "What if FOX could choose your family for you?" One of the most intriguing contradictions the shows set up is of woman -- or should I say "mother" -- as both interchangeable and indispensable.
In describing their appeal, both shows resort to clichis like "fish out of water" and "Is the grass greener?" and yet, looking at the forms, it's clear the producers are reaching for bigger buttons to push. "Wife Swap" just comes out and asks prospective applicants, "Where do you stand on politics?" and then, "What kind of vacations do you take?" and "Do you attend museums, the theater, ballet, opera?" Fox's application is much less involved and far more direct: Do you own or rent? What do you do? Who wears the pants in the family, and what family would be the opposite of yours? "Trading Spouses" is clearly looking to match odd couples.
