Pop Culture Confessions: Wife Swap

I know. This is a bad one.

For our second installment of the Pop Culture Confessions series, I turn my attention to something truly shameful. Like, truly shameful—and truly shameful in the context of a full series in which I am already putting my most embarrassing pop culture consumption on display.

As a reminder, Pop Culture Confessions is a place where I break down the media I love but feel weird (or worse) about. I’ll give myself the space to fangirl while also being transparent about my ambivalence (or worse) and how I might be able to untangle it.

Find the last edition of Pop Culture Confessions HERE.

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Today, I want to talk about a real disaster of a show: Wife Swap.

(I already told you that I am NOT PROUD of this. Remember: this is a no-judgement zone.)

Sidenote: How wild is it that the people in this poster are just out there existing somewhere?

First, let’s talk about my history with this… production.

Wife Swap premiered on ABC in 2004, and I have vague memories of watching it passively around that time. I’ve always been a fan of reality shows, particularly those that focus on families and use a documentary style (understanding, of course, that “documentary” is a relative term in these often highly-produced settings). I have no doubt that, if we stumbled on an episode of Wife Swap when I was in high school, my mom and I would have watched it together. For those who don’t know, the basic format of Wife Swap is pretty much what you might expect based on the title: each episode features two families that differ substantially in significant ways and who have agreed to—yes—swap wives for two weeks. The implied goal is to give participants exposure to an unfamiliar way of life and to give families the opportunity to learn from each other. For the first week of every swap, the so-called “new wife” must go with the flow of her new environment. During week two, they get to impose their own routines and rules.

My fascination with the show ratcheted up a notch when I was a sophomore in college. I lived in a single room in my sorority house that year, and when a friend of mine who lived down the hall and I realized that reruns regularly aired on cable in the afternoons, we convened whenever possible to watch. It was the ultimate form of people-watching… which has always been one of my favorite pastimes.

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Currently Reading: Counting the Cost by Jill Duggar
Could there be a more appropriate CR for a Pop Culture Confessions post? I think not. Having developed something of an academic interest in all things megachurch and Christian influencer for my novel, I’ve been waiting not-so-patiently for this memoir. I’m still left with some questions, but it’s been a quick read and I do applaud Jill for telling this part of her story.

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Let’s be clear: not once in my life—including during this sophomore year in college that I just described—have I earnestly named Wife Swap on the list of my actual favorite shows. But there’s just something about it that’s always drawn me in…

I recently discovered that the entire Wife Swap archive had been uploaded to Hulu, and it’s become one of my go-to shows to have on in the background while I exercise. Each episode is about 40 minutes, which is the perfect duration for a workout for me these days.

There are a lot of reasons that I know (I. know.) enjoying this show is shameful…

• Most obviously, it plays into and reinforces some very heteronormative, gendered, and often regressive ideas about what a family “should” look like. I know the show has been rebooted here and there over the years and I’m not sure if they’ve widened their casting to include, for example, queer couples, but in its original iteration, Wife Swap focused solely on families with a husband/father and wife/mother. This was, unfortunately, the standard “definition” of a family when the show was being produced. It’s no excuse, but it does mean that we shouldn’t be surprised.

• To make things worse, in many cases, one of the families featured on any given episode is a so-called “feminist” or “progressive” family, while the other is committed to “traditional” values in which a man works and leads the home and a woman supports him. While I believe that everyone is entitled to make their own choices about what works for their family—as long as they’re not hurting anyone—with two decades of hindsight, I can see how counterproductive it is to consistently pit two extreme philosophies against each other. It leaves little room for nuance or for viewers to understand the many ways in which a family unit can function.

• Because the show leaned toward casting families with extreme views and living situations, there are moments when it feels as though producers are making caricatures of real people according to their social status, religious beliefs, or ethnic background. Given the fact that reality TV was in its infancy when Wife Swap premiered, I’m confident that most of the folks who opted into the show didn’t have any frame of reference for what it might look or feel like to be produced for television… and it does hurt my heart to know that many of them were made to feel silly as a result.

Yes. There’s a lot to cringe about.

Here’s why I can’t help but like it (in a very weird way)…