Adoption Links

Being in charge of a reality show must be hard work. Just when you think it’s all been done, your bosses expect you to come up with some new way to exploit… I mean entertain, the American viewing public.

I’m sure it makes some TV execs want to quit reality and go into game shows. But not the producers of Wife Swap, ABC network’s “critically-acclaimed” unscripted reality show that furthers understanding among disparate cultures by pointing out how extraordinarily different families live their lives. They’re not panicking over content. Instead, they’re taking a page from the Extreme Home Makeover playbook. They’re appealing to emotion. They’re seeking to reunite an adoptee with her birth mother. Isn’t that nice?

Question: Isn’t the name of the show Wife Swap? How does the adoption reunion come into the equation?

Apparently, the producers would like to cast a female adoptee who wants to be reunited with her birth mother. The network will conduct the search on her behalf and approach her birth mother with the intention of a reunion, but more importantly with the idea that they, mother and daughter, would switch places and be recorded for one week.

According to Molly Sebastian from RDF Media, who wrote the announcement that appeared on Adoption Week’s web site, they are “looking for families who consist of two parents with at least one child living in the home full time. Families who are chosen to participate on the show will receive a $20,000 honorarium.”

Adoption web site Harlow’s Monkey, and others, have pointed out that “this would mean the adoptee would be “parenting” her half siblings and her mother would be “parenting” her grandchildren. And the adoptee would be living with her “stepfather.”" Ironically, this catastrophic side-effect may have been thought out and intentional. Or at least, that’s my cynical suspicion.

I can only speculate that the producers at ABC would be hoping for an international adoptee to volunteer, because of the inherent cultural hilarity that would inevitably ensue. Because we know from watching television that laughing at other cultures is, indeed, quite funny. And if it’s on television, then it must be true.

Although, considering, for $20,000… I’m half-tempted to get a wig and and some lip gloss and give it a shot anyway. Umma, are you reading this? Give me a call!

Wife Swap is in its third season on Mondays (8:00-9:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.

via Harlow’s Monkey via Adoption Week