The family of the blue mom featured on last night's episode of "Wife Swap," Christy Oeth, a Philadelphia working mom, is described as "putting 'success before family life' and as 'high achievers who run their family like a business.'" But Oeth, who works at an investment firm, told the Times that "she had stayed home for five years to raise her four children, a fact the producers never share with viewers, and that she had returned to work only last year, when her husband left a high-pressure job in Manhattan." According to Oeth, "There is a very big element of unreality to the way they pigeonholed me."

At least some of the drama, though, has been set up in the shows' casting. For February sweeps, "Wife Swap" went the extra mile, pairing a lesbian couple from Arizona (described as "radical liberals") with interracial swappees from Texas ("ultra right-wing conservatives"). Stay-at-home Texan Kris Gillespie, an African-American who can turn setting the table into a faith-based initiative, switches places with butch Christine. Over the course of the swap, Kris' terrorized teens get to drop their daily Bible table-reads, chores and "dining experience" for sleepovers and paper plates while they come to terms with the fact that there's a sinner "out to liberate" running the house. Christine is gentle and well-meaning ("She brought new light to the house," one family member says), even managing to get the extremely anal, zombie millionaire husband into the arms of a "cowboy" at a gay dance club.

Kris, on the other hand, brings both members of her adopted Arizona family to tears within 24 hours, and is outraged, offended and disgusted by the fact that a gay couple is raising a child (Lizzy, gay wife Nicky's daughter from a previous relationship). She grits her teeth and minds her manicure while being bossed around, counting the hours until the "rule change" when she can unleash hell, in the form of a huge American flag on the mantel, a Republican sign on the lawn, and an ironic "don't ask, don't tell" sit-down with Nicky that results in a screaming match over who's got it worse, black women or lesbian couples. Kris giveth and Kris taketh away from 11-year-old Lizzy, who gets a tiara and a cookie-baking lesson but loses the TV in her room. "This is what it means to parent excellently," Kris informs us, while over in her Texas home Christine mutters, "I feel like I'm in a mall." (While the show is remarkable in the way it primes the red vs. blue pump, it's unique in that Kris is so monstrous that blue Christine invariably wins the audience's sympathy.)

"Wife Swap" always ends with the two reunited couples facing off, ostensibly to share what they learned but usually with amusing stabs at tact: "You're unique in your own way," offered one stymied mom. In this episode Kris saved the best for last, calling Christine a sexual predator. Nicky responded with "asinine, ignorant" and "crazy bitch," prompting Kris to unload "depraved, freaky, weird" and "immoral." Kris' husband, Brian, completely buckled in the presence of his wife, and Christine joined the small club of her family members made to sob by the woman who will go home and pray for their souls as her children sit obediently by.

This, however, was at least a more honest version of the thin, phony gloss we're subjected to when the couples finally square off. The inevitable upshot is that both families testify about being newly aware of how great they have it, and relieved they don't have to live like those other wackos. Being exposed to difference "reinforced my values," Kris cooed, and surely those on both sides of the political fence nodded along with her. Which makes sense, since validating the audience's political convictions -- rather than capturing any sort of reality -- is what these shows are trying hardest to do.

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