Wife Swap

Does anybody else watch this show? I'm sure somebody else must, otherwise they wouldn't keep it on the air. I couldn't bring myself to watch it for a long time because I thought that they were swapping wives in the Biblical sense of the word, and I thought, as I was eating Goober Grape peanut butter and jelly with a Snickers bar, that that was too tasteless for me to watch. Fortunately, our culture still thinks that it's a bad idea to put adultery on as reality t.v, and so the actual version is a little more tame.

The premise is simple: a wife from one family lives for two weeks with another family, and the other family's wife goes to live with the first family. The first week, the new wife has to abide by the rules of the house she's living in, and the second week she gets to implement some new policies. This helps everyone to get a new perspective on life as well as feeling a little bit better about themselves.

But the catch is, in typical reality t.v. fashion, they choose the families that would be just about the worst fits for each other. In previous weeks, I have seen a family where the mother likes to flaunt her body move in with a very strictly conservative Christian home-schooling family, one where an environmental activist moves in with a family who loves hunting animals, and one where a mother whose family runs a freak show move in with a family that stresses looking good above all else.

What I don't get is how everybody on these shows gets so worked up during them. I mean, the only way you could not realize what was going to happen on this show is if you had never seen it, and if you are pig ignorant enough to believe that this show was just going to be a good time, you might be better suited for waiting in a sound proof room before coming onstage at the Jerry Springer show than for reality t.v. These people must be expecting this:

But what they more often get is this:

Oh well, at least it's fun to watch. Back to my candy bars and peanut butter.