Kwazy Kwistians
As reality television has evolved, producers have got much cannier about “what works,” and the choreographed collisions between contestants have only gotten more and more garish.
Case in point: Last week’s Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy. Such life-swapping shows have long dabbled in cartoonish pairings of contestants (vegan activist mom gets sent to live in a house filled with taxidermy!) with occasionally rich results (if there’s anything funnier than a vegan activist mom offering a sobbing apology to a mounted deer head, please tell me what it is).
But things might’ve crossed over to the dark side with last week’s Trading Spouses, in which a professional hypnotherapist swapped lives with a die-hard born-again Christian. Unsurprisingly, the Christian provided the majority of the drama—hearing Satan in the family’s dryer, demanding to be taken to a church after accidentally speaking to a psychic on the phone—all culminating in a fire-breathing freak-out available for your viewing pleasure here.
FYI: the envelope you see the woman tearing up contains the reward money her family was due to receive for participating in the show. Key twist: the spending of each family’s $50,000 prize money is decided by the opposite mother. In this case, the hypnotherapist mom earmarked various funds for the Christian mom’s kids to fulfill their dreams plus $20,000 for the Christian mom to receive the gastric-bypass surgery she wanted. Meanwhile the Christian mom gave the hypnotherapist’s family engraved King James bibles, funds for various family projects, and $400 to get rid of their possessed dryer.
I know it’s not fair to judge a people by their reality-TV counterparts, but damn, this is an entertaining bit of Christian psychosis.

