I briefly touched on last night's episode of Celebrity Wife Swap in my review of the premiere. It served as a "preview episode" and aired the day before Gary Busey and Ted Haggard inaugurated ABC's latest foray into reality programming. As I watched it last night for the second time, the giant question mark floating over my head was, "Why this episode?" Why was this the preview and first impression of this show? Why did this episode warrant two primetime airings in four weeks? Tracey Gold and Carnie Wilson are certainly not as controversial or prominent as some of the other celebrities who've been featured. For pure notoriety, Flava Flav and Ted Haggard could eclipse either of these ladies.
None of the reactions were incredibly dramatic. No one sailed off the show in a fury to bed down at a hotel or broke down in tears or went sky diving (all of which have previously happened… in the same episode. Love you Suzette Snider!)
Celebrity Wife Swap carefully matches families to present contrasts or recognizable narratives (the Country Mouse and City Mouse story of Tina Yothers and Niecy Nash, for example). But this episode took me both viewings to gauge. On the one hand, we had Tracey Gold's family. She's a neat freak! She does all her own cleaning! She and her husband are raising four very well-behaved little boys! When I say she and her husband are raising the kids, I mean they are side by side, hip to hip, wrangling those munchkins like a tag team finding holds in the ring.
On the other hand, we had the much larger house of Carnie Wilson, the songstress from Wilson Phillips and the daughter of musical genius Brian Wilson. She has two tiny daughters and two chilled-out housekeepers looking after them. Her husband spends all day looking like Lindsey Buckingham and noodling around with a Fender in one of his three music rooms (including their in-house studio).
This particular spousal exchange was slated for the shortest amount of time (three days), and that right there seemed like a reason to disqualify this episode from representing the whole season. Carnie and Tracey are charming people with lovely families, and that should have disqualified them as well: As with all reality TV, conflict is the spine of the narrative and should be long and strong. Crazy people do that better.
As I watched, I considered how Tracey Gold is not just super grounded, she's probably the least-celebrity celebrity I've seen in years, expressing no illusions about returning to her former fame, dressing in off-the-rack J.C. Penney casual pieces, and looking all-around like a perfect specimen of your average American housewife.
At first I thought the contrast was neat freak versus messy person. But the show dropped that thread and ultimately it was never brought up when the couples gathered at the end. So then I thought maybe it was socioeconomic, like a family who has help around the house versus a family who doesn't—that was part of the issue, but Carnie never really addressed an opposing view of "seriously, get a maid service to come in once a week." So then I decided the contrast here was a marriage that works against a marriage that doesn't, because Tracey Gold and her husband are so enthusiastically a pair, while Carnie and husband Rob Bonfiglio have a relationship closer to a mom and her difficult teenage son who is always upstairs in the attic, noodling around on his Fender guitar.
But Rob was shown making an honest effort to meet Tracey's rules halfway, so that didn't quite fit the narrative of the editing. In the one day that Tracey made him eat dinner with his children, he had revelation after revelation that this is what family life is! Spending time with other people strengthens relationships? RECORD SCRATCH. Why didn't somebody TELL ME?!
And then the clouds parted and a full thought made it through my Diet Coke-addled brain. This episode, back when it aired as a series preview, was supposed to serve as an entry point for the audience because it pitted a typical "celebrity lifestyle" against a normal, average lifestyle. Carnie and Rob are selfish artists, caught up in their own careers, with all the money they could possibly want but other people raising their children. They don't have to pick up after themselves and they rattle around in their mansion, yelling out to each other for company with desperation that blossoms into discord. Carnie may be wealthier and have a more dynamic career than Tracey, but she was edited in more than once expressing jealousy for Tracey and Rob's relationship.
In contrast, Tracey, with her cute average wardrobe and rock-solid family structure, taught these celebrity gaddabouts a couple no-brainers that any family with a soccer van will stand up and cheer for. You need to make time! You need to hug! Family is the main focus!
The episode seemed to promise: These celebrities do not know what they are doing! They would be lost trying to live your life. You think you're envious of celebrities? They would be jealous of you and your more authentic lifestyle. They are lost in their passions, alienated by their money from their own families, and incapable of running a washing machine. More than anything, they want the domestic bliss which they simply cannot buy!
Now, that is a message I think is almost consistently false, but I can see it motivating a Season 2 renewal from ABC, and it certainly puts the rest of the episodes in a different context. This is a series that asks you to assess, judge, and feel superior to people based on their lives! Not their careers, not their parenting skills, not their interior design—the whole package, which somehow I guess we can absorb from thirty minutes of an aggressively edited long weekend. For some people that's a selling point, for others its a dangerous and damning premise.
QUESTIONS:
... Was Rob really working up there in the music room or messing around on his guitar to avoid an awkward situation?
... Who's life looked more authentic: Carnie's or Tracey's?
... Wait: Why don't they call it Spouse Swap again? Does a show's tone benefit from a weirdly sexy/sexist title?
... Are you going to watch Tracey Gold in her upcoming 2012 SyFy movie Arachnoquake?
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