PREMIERE

YOU'VE BEEN WAITING ALL SUMMER FOR IT-THE ORIGINAL "WIFE SWAP" PREMIERES SEPTEMBER 29 ON ABC!

The Critically-Acclaimed Reality Show Premieres with A Multi-Millionaire Heiress From New York City Trading Husband, Children and the Keys to Her Home with a Blue-Collar Woodcutter from Rural New Jersey

"It's the most promising new reality show of the Fall season." -- Lynette Rice, Entertainment Weekly, September 10, 2004

"Wife Swap"-the critically acclaimed show from the creators of the original U.K. smash hit-premieres WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 (10:00-11:00 p.m., ET), on the ABC Television Network. This unscripted reality show takes us into the intimate heart of the American family home and reveals the extraordinarily different ways families live their lives.

Editors please note: This program will repeat Saturday, October 2, from 10:00-11:00 p.m., ET.

Each week, from across the country, two families are chosen with very different values. In a two week-long challenge, the wives from these two families exchange husbands, children and lives (but not bedrooms) to discover what it's like to live a very different woman's life. It's a mind-blowing experiment that will change their lives forever.

In the premiere episode, "Spolansky/Bradley," 37-year-old New York mom Jodi Spolansky-a multi-millionaire heiress with a husband and three children-swaps lives with 45-year-old Lynn Bradley, a woodcutter from rural New Jersey with a husband and two teenage daughters.

Jodi's day is taken up with lunches, manicures, shopping and working out at the gym-"me time," she calls it. As part of Jodi's extravagant lifestyle, she has three nannies and a housekeeper to care for her three children, and only spends an hour a day with the kids herself. Jodi and her husband, Steven, eat out six nights a week-this is a woman who hasn't cooked in more than eight years.

Lynn, on the other hand, is a hard-working mother from a blue-collar family. She drives a school bus, chops wood for six hours a day and lives in a house she built with her husband, Brad, a woodsman. Lynn also does all the cooking and cleaning. Tensions flare when Lynn is insulted by Steven, who criticizes what he calls her "hillbilly" ways, and Brad and Jodi have an explosive blowout after Jodi skips out on her wood cutting duties.

As if spending two weeks with a new family weren't demanding enough, in the first week the wives must abide by the departing wife's house rules, which cover everything from parenting to shopping, social life to budgeting.

But in week two the rules change dramatically, as the wives are given the power to run their new household their way! With the new family required to abide by the new rules, the results are explosive, revealing, riveting-and often very funny.

The two couples are then reunited, and all four participants meet for the first time in a highly-charged exchange of views, making frank assessments of each other and sharing what they learned from the experience.

"Wife Swap" is a show about families and what really matters-to all of us. It shows, in a highly entertaining way, that what one family thinks is normal, another family will find strange and often down-right weird! When it first premiered in the UK in 2003, the series became an instant sensation and the country's most talked-about television show. The smash hit has won numerous awards, most recently the prestigious BAFTA Award for best reality show, and the Golden Rose-Europe's top entertainment television award-presented at the International Rose D'Or Festival. Now in its third season, the show currently airs everywhere from France to Australia, Denmark to New Zealand. It has been sold as an acquisition or a format in more than twenty international territories.

"Wife Swap" is an RDF Media production. It was created by Stephen Lambert and is executive-produced by Lambert and Jenny Crowther of RDF Media ("Faking It" and "Junkyard Wars") and Michael Davies of Diplomatic ("Who Wants to be a Millionaire"). Wendy Roth is the co-executive producer.

This program carries a TV-PG,L parental guideline.