Wife swap! The phrase conjures up images of an X-treme, "Hite Report"-era "Temptation Island," a televised swingers' slumber party starring Elliott Gould. Cue the groovy sitar music.
Luckily, the actual TV series "Wife Swap" is nothing of the sort. ABC's upcoming sitdoc, based on a British series of the same name, owes more to Frederick Wiseman than Frederick's of Hollywood.
"Wife Swap" is a fascinating, semibewildered exploration of modern-day housewifery, in all its inherent contradiction. It's also one of many harbingers that TV is rekindling its long-standing love affair with the housewife.
After a long, loveless decade and a half, housewives are back; retro nomenclature and all. Display tables at Barnes & Noble have been buckling under the weight of novels about frenetic working moms, earnest anthologies about home life and alarmist harangues on marriage and reproduction. The proto-feminist domestic horror story "The Stepford Wives" was just remade as a self-loathing comedy. The New Yorker magazine recently hired a staff writer to write about domestic life -- a subject about which she is conflicted.
The profusion of pop polemics -- not to mention the recent dethroning of Martha Stewart -- suggests that housewifery is due for a new definition, possibly a whole new brand-identity. Right now, the vagueness of the job description is troubling. Soon, surely, somebody will write something profound, definitive and Susan Sontag-ish, maybe calling it "Toward a Theory of the New Wifery." For now, TV is rushing in to fill the gap.
Before "Wife Swap" even makes it on the air in September, Fox will roll out its preemptive rip-off, "Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy" sometime this summer. "Wife Swap" kicks off three days after the Sept. 26 premiere of ABC's soapy drama "Desperate Housewives." In an apparent grab for the housewifely demographic, ABC is rolling out "The Days" next Sunday, a domestic drama in which the mother toils as a lifestyle guru, and "Savages," a fall season sitcom about motherless children and the sorry state of their laundry.
Living the high life
The deceptively simple premise of "Wife Swap" is this: What would happen if two wildly different housewives exchanged households for 10 days? Each woman arrives in her new home not knowing anything about the family she is about to take over -- a family handpicked for its dissimilarity to her own. For the first half of the stay, each does her best to conform to the original wife's habits, laid out in a handbook. For the second half, she subjects the family to her domestic rules. Families are revealed as jingoistic miniature nation-states where, when it comes to domestic life, class, income and/or real estate holdings are meaningless in the face of mom-enforced family bylaws.
In the first episode, a wealthy Manhattan mother (in the loosest sense of the word) of three trades places with a working-class stiff from rural New Jersey. New York wife divides her day between the gym, the hair salon and the shops, and spends an average of an hour a day with her kids. (She employs a staff of three.) New Jersey mom drives a school bus, splits firewood for extra cash, cleans her house and waits on her family hand and foot. Their husbands have few complaints. New York husband expects his wife to be attractive and available for nightly social engagements. New Jersey husband expects his wife to dust around him while he sits on the couch.
In the second episode, a real-life Roseanne trades places with the female version of Captain von Trapp, pre-Maria. The wife from Virginia is loud, undisciplined and obese, like her kids. The Florida wife home schools her five vegetarian children and runs her house with military precision. Arafat and Sharon could trade places and cause less havoc.
Ultimately, "Wife Swap" raises more ontological questions than it skirts. Duties don't extend to the conjugal -- temporary husbands and wives are not allowed to touch one another. Otherwise, the visiting wives' responsibilities are broad, encompassing the general spheres of domestic work, child-rearing and keeping up appearances. It becomes clear, however, that the one thing missing from modern wifedom is consensus. What exactly constitutes wifedom? Is it a job? A sentence? An existential state of being?
In its own, less surprising way, "Desperate Housewives," a drama about four stay-at-homes living on a suburban cul-de-sac, poses some of the same questions. The four friends on Wisteria Lane, as idyllic and cozy a dead end as anyone could ask for, are like ambassadors from various states of marital misery, who only begin to examine their own lives after one of their neighbors unexpectedly commits suicide.
