Days of our wives

Wife swap! The phrase conjures up images of an X-treme, “Hite Report”-era “Temptation Island,” a televised swingers’ slumber party starring Elliott Gould. Cue the groovy sitar music.

Luckily, the actual TV series “Wife Swap” is nothing of the sort. ABC’s upcoming sitdoc, based on a British series of the same name, owes more to Frederick Wiseman than Frederick’s of Hollywood.

“Wife Swap” is a fascinating, semibewildered exploration of modern-day housewifery, in all its inherent contradiction. It’s also one of many harbingers that TV is rekindling its long-standing love affair with the housewife.

After a long, loveless decade and a half, housewives are back; retro nomenclature and all. Display tables at Barnes & Noble have been buckling under the weight of novels about frenetic working moms, earnest anthologies about home life and alarmist harangues on marriage and reproduction. The proto-feminist domestic horror story “The Stepford Wives” was just remade as a self-loathing comedy. The New Yorker magazine recently hired a staff writer to write about domestic life -- a subject about which she is conflicted.

The profusion of pop polemics -- not to mention the recent dethroning of Martha Stewart -- suggests that housewifery is due for a new definition, possibly a whole new brand-identity. Right now, the vagueness of the job description is troubling. Soon, surely, somebody will write something profound, definitive and Susan Sontag-ish, maybe calling it “Toward a Theory of the New Wifery.” For now, TV is rushing in to fill the gap.

Before “Wife Swap” even makes it on the air in September, Fox will roll out its preemptive rip-off, “Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy” sometime this summer. “Wife Swap” kicks off three days after the Sept. 26 premiere of ABC’s soapy drama “Desperate Housewives.” In an apparent grab for the housewifely demographic, ABC is rolling out “The Days” next Sunday, a domestic drama in which the mother toils as a lifestyle guru, and “Savages,” a fall season sitcom about motherless children and the sorry state of their laundry.

Living the high life

The deceptively simple premise of “Wife Swap” is this: What would happen if two wildly different housewives exchanged households for 10 days? Each woman arrives in her new home not knowing anything about the family she is about to take over -- a family handpicked for its dissimilarity to her own. For the first half of the stay, each does her best to conform to the original wife’s habits, laid out in a handbook. For the second half, she subjects the family to her domestic rules. Families are revealed as jingoistic miniature nation-states where, when it comes to domestic life, class, income and/or real estate holdings are meaningless in the face of mom-enforced family bylaws.

In the first episode, a wealthy Manhattan mother (in the loosest sense of the word) of three trades places with a working-class stiff from rural New Jersey. New York wife divides her day between the gym, the hair salon and the shops, and spends an average of an hour a day with her kids. (She employs a staff of three.) New Jersey mom drives a school bus, splits firewood for extra cash, cleans her house and waits on her family hand and foot. Their husbands have few complaints. New York husband expects his wife to be attractive and available for nightly social engagements. New Jersey husband expects his wife to dust around him while he sits on the couch.

In the second episode, a real-life Roseanne trades places with the female version of Captain von Trapp, pre-Maria. The wife from Virginia is loud, undisciplined and obese, like her kids. The Florida wife home schools her five vegetarian children and runs her house with military precision. Arafat and Sharon could trade places and cause less havoc.

Ultimately, “Wife Swap” raises more ontological questions than it skirts. Duties don’t extend to the conjugal -- temporary husbands and wives are not allowed to touch one another. Otherwise, the visiting wives’ responsibilities are broad, encompassing the general spheres of domestic work, child-rearing and keeping up appearances. It becomes clear, however, that the one thing missing from modern wifedom is consensus. What exactly constitutes wifedom? Is it a job? A sentence? An existential state of being?

In its own, less surprising way, “Desperate Housewives,” a drama about four stay-at-homes living on a suburban cul-de-sac, poses some of the same questions. The four friends on Wisteria Lane, as idyllic and cozy a dead end as anyone could ask for, are like ambassadors from various states of marital misery, who only begin to examine their own lives after one of their neighbors unexpectedly commits suicide.

Susan (Teri Hatcher) a lonely, insecure divorcee, is trying to find her sea legs after being abandoned by her husband (who mocks her in front of their daughter) for his secretary. Lynette (Felicity Huffman) is a former career woman with four rowdy boys whose husband travels constantly. She misses her job and is afraid to admit she hates being a stay-at-home mom. Bree (Marcia Cross) is an overly motivated Martha Stewart type whose family can’t stand her demented attention to domestic detail. Gabrielle (Eva Longoria), the trophy wife of an investment banker, is bored by her swaggering husband and entertains herself by bedding the teenage gardener. Following the death of Mary Alice (Brenda Strong), the four friends are left behind to browse through their catalog of dissatisfaction. They may all be different, but they are all vaguely unhappy, and all wrong.

When, on “Savages,” the beleaguered single father of a tribe of teenage boys loses yet another housekeeper, he decides to charge his sons with the onerous -- and in their eyes emasculating -- task of keeping house. They rebel, singing the blues about a father who tries to turn his sons into women by making them do housework.

On “The Days,” the teenage narrator describes his mother’s trajectory as having “recently emerged from intermittent child-bearing and housewifery to earn a promotion as creative director of a big Philadelphia ad agency.” On the day of her first big presentation, she gets a call from her youngest son’s school. “Kids come first,” her boss parrots sourly. Later, after the bad news from home won’t stop pouring in, she breaks down. “I suck! I should be home!”

Maybe today’s conflicted TV women are just evidence of the cultural “birth pangs” historian Marilyn Yalom referred to at the end of her 2002 book, “A History of the Wife.”

“I suspect that the death of the ‘little woman,’ ” she wrote, “will not be grieved by the multitude, even if society must endure severe birth pangs in producing the new wife.”

But watching “Wife Swap” and “Desperate Housewives,” it strikes you how much time has passed since TV last promoted a prescribed wifely ideal. From its start until sometime in the 1970s, TV women tended to be of the June Cleaver, Donna Reed and Carol Brady variety. Until shows like “That Girl” and “Mary Tyler Moore” made liberated single girls seem plucky and glamorous, female ambition -- Lucy’s showbiz aspirations in “I Love Lucy,” say -- was mostly played for laughs.

Except for a brief resurfacing, in the form of “The Cosby Show’s” Clair Huxtable, the ideal, the ‘50s-era TV wife disappeared long ago. A putative lawyer (who never seemed to work) and mother of five (whose domestic duties were apparently effortless), Clair was an even more ludicrous model of wife and motherhood than June Cleaver. Yet just this April, she was named “best TV mom” in an opinion poll conducted by Opinion Research Corp. She’s the best we’ve got?

In the 1990s, TV gave up on housewives altogether and refocused its attention on singles -- though this time, the young unmarrieds were not so much asserting their independence as whining about it. “Seinfeld’s” characters stayed single and selfish and wound up in jail. “Friends” got married and wound up in Connecticut. (Marlo Thomas, the erstwhile independent “That Girl,” had a particularly ironic recurring role as Rachel’s divorced and bitter mom; Elliott Gould a not-so-ironic one as Ross and Monica’s still-married dad.)

So far, an acceptable “new wife” has yet to materialize on TV. As far as housewifery is concerned, we’re living in a paradigmatic vacuum. There is no longer an ideal, nor a clear antithesis to that ideal. After a long absence, the family matriarch has returned -- but she’s disgruntled.

The irony is that these conflicted images arrive at a time when domestic fantasies are at an all-time cultural high, as evidenced by the popularity of cable shows dedicated to cooking and home decor. These aren’t just the fantasies of married women, women with children or even women at all.

The climate has radically changed since 1975, when “The Stepford Wives” premiered. Back then, the belief in gender-as-destiny was fresh enough in the minds of women that, for the affluent at least, suburban housewifery was tainted with a sense of inevitability. Middle-class suburban women were casting around for an escape hatch, but still, resistance seemed futile. For the heroine, Joanna (Katharine Ross), suburban Connecticut looked like some sort of creepy girl-graveyard. Writing about the remake, more than one critic noted that it looked pretty good to them.

The housewife lifestyle

As the remake of “The Stepford Wives” acknowledged by inserting a gay couple into the mix, the new domestic escape fantasy -- in which domestic life resembles an indefinite bucolic vacation from work and its attendant terrors -- is shared by today’s gender-neutral Gen-X housewives. (The male wife recently got his own tract, “The Bastard on the Couch,” edited by novelist Daniel Jones, husband of Cathi Hanauer, of “The Bitch in the House” fame.) In this context, “Savages,” executive produced by manly man and father of seven Mel Gibson, feels dated and out of touch.

One could argue that today’s rich stay-at-home housewife in the Juicy Couture sweatsuit is what the millionaire in the silk top hat was to Depression-era comedies -- a subject of envy and target of satire. On “The Sopranos,” Carmela’s perfect wife and mother shtick is subsidized by organized crime. On “Six Feet Under,” Nate recently met a divorced mom in a “Mommy & Me” class who told him right before they go to bed -- a nooner, while the kids play with the help downstairs -- that her “great life” began after her well-subsidized divorce.

“It was hard to quit working,” she says. “But staying home with Jaden was the best decision I ever made.” Nate notes that Jaden is outside playing with her nannies. “One nanny. The other one is a housekeeper,” she says smiling..

It’s a luxury to be able to attend to your own needs -- let alone your family’s needs -- the way we imagine these idealized wives do. These days, nobody takes the time to bake the muffins. As a (male) friend remarked, more ruefully than anything, “Who has time to be a girl anymore?”

Nowadays, it appears to take someone who can make a career out of it -- preferably on TV. Tonight, ABC airs “The Great Domestic Showdown,” a two-hour special in which six people -- male, female, straight and gay -- compete for the chance to win “a budding media empire” consisting of a TV pilot and a book deal. One of the contestants, a young gay man from Brooklyn named Korey Provencher, would like to ride that wave. “I am a housewife,” he proclaims. “I am a 50-year-old woman in the body of a 26-year-old kid.”

“The domestic arts are taking America by storm....Today, a void exists to find a new face in the lifestyle arena,” booms the “Showdown” announcer. No kidding. The “void” was left by the woman who is single-handedly responsible for the revival of dedicated housewifery: Martha Stewart.

The recent remake of “The Stepford Wives” may have idled at the box office, but its convoluted message reflects a lurking ambivalence about Martha-style domesticity. Otherwise, what are we to make of the fact that the 2004 remake of the camp horror feminist classic takes as its villain Glenn Close’s Claire Wellington?

Claire is set up to be despised both for her impossibly perky Welcome Wagon demeanor and for her past achievements as a neurosurgeon and engineer. Formerly brilliant, she is now mad, driven to the brink by overwork and a neglected husband who took up with her assistant.

The remake forgoes the dark ending of the original, in which the villain was “Dis,” a single man who turns the young wives of Stepford into robots. In the remake, “Dis” becomes Claire’s husband, “Mike,” who looks and sounds like the villain, until we realize he’s a victim -- robot-ized by Claire. (When in doubt, blame Glenn Close.)

No wonder Martha Stewart was knocked so forcefully from her pedestal. As the person who created new housewifely fictions that nobody could live up to, Stewart has left behind more than a domestic goddess/lifestyle mogul-shaped hole in the media universe. She’s left behind a gaping question. Maybe that’s what she was indicted for.

Contact Carina Chocano at carina.chocano@latimes.com.