We use cookies to enable features and market content. View privacy policy or manage cookies. How it works. Chrystal Norton is organizing this fundraiser. Lucas passed away on July 30, very unexpectedly. Not only is this a devastating emotional blow to an already grieving family, but the financial toll is going to be extensive.
Luke has lived with Chrystal since an accident in left him with a TBI diagnosis, multiple anxiety disorders, seizures and the inability to work, aside from the odd job here and there. Being a widowed mother of two, Chrystal had her mother, Sherry, to help with Luke and the children so she could work. Lucas lost his longtime girlfriend, Marissa, in early which added to his anxiety and depression.
Sherry's unexpected passing in April left Chrystal and Luke with huge holes in their hearts and, of course, a huge financial burden. Over the past year since their mothers passing Chrystal has done everything possible to keep the family afloat while working limited hours in order to attend to Lucas and her children's daily needs and a wide array of appointments. While most of us are struggling now, Chrystal and Lucas were already struggling, so Chrystal being out of work altogether was a huge hit.
Now Chrystal is left to cover the costs of final arrangements for her dear brother. The emotional toll of dealing with her devastated children and nephew, along with being sick and grieving herself. But for anyone familiar with the show, it can't be that big of a surprise -- we already knew the show went to elaborate lengths to exploit the country's raging culture wars for melodrama.
Most reality shows traffic in pitting opposite "types" against each other, and usually the conflicts are rooted in issues of class, race, religion or even that snakepit of "family values. Neither "Wife Swap" nor "Trading Spouses" is a top 20 show, but both do fairly well especially considering that their audience is probably split , with Both play best in the South and the Midwest, while performing poorly in the Northeast and the Pacific Coast.
This makes sense, since both shows bathe red-state moms in an earthy, warm glow, while their blue-state counterparts are showered with lukewarm confusion at best, icy negligence at worst. And "Wife Swap," apparently, has no qualms about spinning the truth to make each show as incendiary as possible.
According to the Times: "Making a 'swap' ready for prime time can entail withholding facts from the viewer that might muddle the central premise; supplying participants with material to read aloud; rehearsing pivotal confrontations off-screen; and, in some cases, re-enacting events the cameras missed.
ABC shrewdly bought the show concept outright in , but then the jackals at Fox caught wind of "Wife Swap's" anticipated September debut and slapped their own version together, getting "Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy" on the air a full two months earlier, during the rerun doldrums of July.
According to forms from the networks, you can apply to ABC to be a "Wife Swap" participant only "if you are a family unit," which is helpfully defined as two parents and children. The Fox application is not billed as an application at all but as a "casting call. In describing their appeal, both shows resort to clichis like "fish out of water" and "Is the grass greener?
What do you do? Who wears the pants in the family, and what family would be the opposite of yours? The whole process and the program, ultimately is geared toward women; it's women answering the questions that fire the distended bellies of network execs, who have clearly rediscovered the joys of exploiting America's perennial surplus of maternal angst.
The shows revolve around the assumption that the mother not only sets the tone of the family, she is the family, while the father and kids simply take cues. The shows pander to that notion, which many mothers use to anchor their identities, while at the same time revealing the fragility of that identity, holding it up to that of other mothers, and the prospect of being shown up by some hick from Arkansas, or some bitch from New York.
Of course, self-loathing and self-doubt are firm pillars of reality TV's foundation, particularly with regard to women. One of the earliest and longest-running shows was a reality show -- "Queen for a Day" -- that makes "Wife Swap" and "Trading Spouses" look like "Masterpiece Theatre. Every week, both shows pit mothers from the heartland of America against those from either coast or the Northeast; sometimes they find blue-collar mothers from New Jersey, or Illinois, which in some ways amounts to red in the context of the show but is mainly another way to make Democrats look undesirable.
The conflict that drives each episode is almost always drawn from the clash of the hippie i. High jinks ensue and toes are mashed when someone like Colleen Verruto, say, leaves her California high life to slum it in what looks like a taxidermy stand in Tennessee on "Trading Spouses. On "Trading Spouses," for example, you've got Minnesota vs. Tennessee, Texas vs. New York, and San Diego vs. New Orleans. Generally, the blue mom was either a lazy dipstick or more focused on work, money and order than family.
The red moms tended to be gentle, focused and simple.
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