In 1973, New York Yankees pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson arrived in spring training and announced that they had switched families, trading wives and kids and everything. At the time, the New York media was up in arms over the scandal. What they didn't understand was that Kekich and Peterson weren't doing anything sordid, they were just 30 years ahead of the curve. ABC is developing a version of the wildly popular British reality show "Wife Swap."

According to London's Guardian newspaper, since it began airing earlier this year, "Wife Swap" has become one of television's surprise hits for Britain's Channel Four. The show's premise is extremely simple. Two wives, from totally different backgrounds, switch families for two weeks. In the first week, the wives have to obey by the house rules of their new family and then in the second week, they get to take over.

The show's British producer RDF Media has already shot a test pilot for the American version of the show, transplanting the matriarchs of a New Age California family and a straight-laced Italian family from New Jersey. The hilarity sounds like shooting fish in a barrel.

"'Wife Swap' is so compelling because it goes to the heart of the myriad of life decisions that we all make as a husband or wife or parent," says Stephen Lambert, the RDF's programming director. "Every family is its own small civilization and Wife Swap is a very dramatic means of revealing the secrets of those civilizations."

Lambert will executive produce the ABC version of the show, which has been tentatively retitled "Trading Moms," because that makes it sound much more savory. The show has been signed for a six-episode run and it's most likely to air during the summer.