According to The Hollywood Reporter, ABC has greenlighted two spinoffs of its upcoming Wife Swap series, which features two wives and mothers trading places for 10 days (but apparently without any extramarital canoodling).
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One spinoff is titled Husband Swap, which is simply a differently-gendered version of the same show. Another, more interesting, spinoff is Boss Swap, which is already in production in the UK, and in which two executives swap workplaces for about two weeks. According to Personnel Today, human resources executives across the UK have been unpleasantly surprised by the picture that Boss Swap has painted of typical British management styles.
Andrea Wong, ABC's executive VP in charge of alternative programming, claimed that today's disclosure of ABC's plans for Husband Swap and Boss Swap was not related to the news today that Fox is planning a quickie ripoff version of Wife Swap entitled Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy, which Fox claimed would include occasional father-swapping. We would like to believe her, but consider us skeptical.
We note, by the way, that management consultant Liz Marks, who worked with the UK version of Boss Swap, claims to have identified four leadership styles among UK bosses: two problematic styles -- the invisible manager and the dictator -- and two positive styles -- the coach and the chameleon. While we think that this is an oversimplification, we admit that we'd like to see the sparks that fly if a chameleon were to be replaced by a dictator while the cameras were rolling.