The show Wife Swap is another reality TV show, as so many know by now. That inevitably means that there are going to be facets of it that are not real, meaning just about everything you could imagine. The show has gained a great amount of attention over the years since people love to watch drama and enjoy the kind of back and forth dialogue that seems to erupt spontaneously on the show. But the downside of this show is that it does manage to cast its stars in a very negative light at times and tends to micromanage just about everything that people do. In essence this show is fun to watch largely because it is a dramatic fiction of a real family. But quite honestly reality TV hasn’t been real since the moment it started.
Here are a few things that were completely fake about Wife Swap.
10. The families are given roles to play on the show.
The families that you see on this show aren’t necessarily the way they appear. A lot of times to spice things up the producers will give them specific roles to play so that the show will flow a little more smoothly and be able to entice the audience in watching. It might seem as though this is undermining the spirit of reality TV but in truth this is what reality TV is about.
9. The producers manipulate the children to create more interesting situations.
Somehow this sounds almost evil in a way and very damaging as the children should be allowed to interact as they please. But the producers of the show will manipulate the kids into acting a certain way so that the show is a bit more entertaining and audience members might be a little more shocked at what goes on.
8. The manuals that are made for each wife are fake.
Has anyone ever listened to some of the stuff that’s written in these manuals? The expected duties of the wives and the expectations they’re walking into seem like something out of a bad sitcom or a comic book. The producers put these manuals together in such a way on purpose so as to make a little more drama in the show.
7. Important information is left out on purpose.
Because of this the audience is allowed to make wild assumptions about the families that are displayed on this show and many times those assumptions turn out to be quite false. The reason behind this however is that the show films hours and hours and then edits it down so that the show can fit the time frame. Unfortunately this means that they get very selective with what they show.
6. At one point a wife was replaced with a man.
You might think this would be a serious breach of ethics on the part of the producers but the show actually spirited one wife away and replaced her with a gay man instead. They also chose not to disclose to the husband where she’d been sequestered until the end of the show. So the husband had to act like a gay man until the show was over. How messed up is that for everyone involved?
5. The rule changes are not natural.
After a week the new wives get to change the rules and normally you’ll see that they’re the complete opposite of the rules that are being instilled in the home. Unfortunately the producers have their hands in this too as they make the rules as opposite as possible.
4. The spouse’s jobs aren’t always the way they seem.
Some of the spouses have very regular, mundane jobs that wouldn’t make for good TV, so again the producers step in and try to spice things up by giving the spouses jobs that are either dangerous or of great interest to others.
3. Set manipulation is used constantly.
Not even the lighting in the show is natural as thanks to their production schedule they’re not always able to shoot the scenes they want at the right time. In this case they use lighting to manipulate the shot and get what they want out of it, which is just another way that they bend the reality aspect of the show to entertain people.
2. The timelines are all made to fit the producers’ idea of what needs to be seen.
In essence the show films the families for a while and then just takes the shots they want in order to place them anywhere in the timeline that they desire. This form of editing just makes things a little more confusing at times and makes it clear that reality is not a driving factor of the show.
1. Families are shown fake-cuts of the show.
There are a lot of families that haven’t liked the way they were represented on the show and in order to keep them from backing out the producers have shown them fake cuts of the program that paint them in a much more positive light. Unfortunately these cuts never make it to TV and the families usually can’t prove that they were shown anything else.
Overall the show is entertaining sometimes but is meant to be treated as just another drama show.
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