Idiot Box Savant: "Trading Spouses"

Loan me your wife!

By Andrew Kiraly

So, there I was, chasing the Savantette around the couch, pretending I was an angry walrus with the help of two almond rocas for tusks, when the millionth political ad shitfully blossomed on TV, full of woggling flags and hometown porridgeheads, acrobats and pink bears and other such wanton minstrelsy. His name was so-and-so, and he approved of this message! Jeezus. I'm not sure what it was, but my spirit had a freeway blowout right then. What's it say when the primary isn't even here and yet you feel that little pinch of exhaustion like you've already voted and voted and voted--every time you see one of those fuzzy-focus, soundbitten blagvertisements? Conniption, deploy!

Anyway, snagged a few hours of "Trading Spouses" this week, the Fox show (Tuesdays, 8 p.m.) that sounds really naughty, but--unfortunately for you and your coupon for 20 percent off St. Ives Keratin Stroke Master lotion--isn't. Instead, it's another fish-out-of-water reality TV show that features a veritable cookie-dough smoovie Chex mix of white MILFbots and mamma-jammas mixing it up with families not from their 'hood.

The show's pretty good, if only as a ham-slam coffin-nail into all that '90s PC spew about tolerance, diversity and understanding--you know, the feelgoody shtuff we sort of put on hold when it came to our attention that lots of Arabs had some subtle philosophical differences with us United Statesians. Sure, "Trading Spouses" has its Lifetime piano-surge moments where cultural gaps are briefly bridged and people of different ethnicities/economic backgrounds/levels of hours worked at Applebee's spiritually commingle in a fleeting moment of humanity, but, in a weirdly unwitting way, the show is largely about not bridging the gap, and how we're all essentially marooned on our own turdy islands with dorkimers just like ourselves. The most recent episode saw Tammy Nakamura-- booth-tanned, airbrushed white-meat trophy wife to a rich Japanese guy--shacking up with the Biggins, a working-class African-American family. Meanwhile, Al Mela Biggins goes to live with the Nakamuras. Both women are eventually killed and eaten by their host families as frustration reaches a fever pitch of primal brutality, but, in life as in anal sex with cheerleaders, the fun's in getting there, right? Here are some "Trading Spouses" highlights to show how different we all are--and in most cases, better than you.

• When the prospect of cooking presents itself, Tammy schlomps into a chair as though desperately trying to summon from the elements a pre-beaten Guatemalan maid to shower her in rich roasted meats. All the while, the rest of her adopted family staves off hunger by trying to hate her guts in the politest way possible. So, the Biggins family, already overworked and stressed out at having to live a diminished life with basic cable and a PS One, have to cook for her.

Meanwhile...

• At the Nakamuras, Al Mela eats sushi for the first time at a fancy restaurant. Closest she'd ever come was undercooked popcorn shrimp at Long John Silver's. With the poor person's quaint mental habits of distrusting new experiences because they might challenge bizarre tribal allegiances, she grimaces as though she's been detoured into the Chuck E. Cheese Rectal Examtime Theater.

Meanwhile...

• Tammy and the Biggins--who've just kinda settled into a watchful, hostile silence around her--go to a ghetto water park, where Tammy can't decide whether to ride Hepatitis Cascades or the Athlete's Foot Slide of Itch. She squawks at the Biggins children--kids after my own lower intestine, snacking mindlessly as the sun brings their melanin to a furious boil--about watching their carbohydrate intake. With zen-like, glucose-glazed aplomb, they look at her in that perfect "shut the fuck up" manner that, for once, makes her shut the fuck up.

Meanwhile...

• Al Mela vacations, too--at the Nakamura's private Lake House, where she strikes up a friendship with 72-year-old Nana. A hired caretaker, Nana does all the things that Tammy's too busy to do, what with all the spa goosh, exfoliations and pore-cleansing treatments designed to make her head look as prettily distinct from the rest of her body as possible, the texture of which resembles a cheap leather purse.

Okay, I'm making this whole enterprise sound hopeless and empty. By the time the swap is over, both Tammy and Al Mela have learned to look deep inside themselves and realize this universal truth: Other people suck. We've all got a little xenophobe inside. Seal the borders of my kingdom, eat the rich and corral the wretched poor into warehouses producing Kathie Lee Gifford Chain Mail Expressions Intimate Wear. I am the Savant, and I approve of this choad-kick!