Trading Spouses, often advertised as Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy, is a FOX

Fox Broadcasting Company

Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly referred to as Fox Network or simply Fox , is an American commercial broadcasting television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Launched on October 9, 1986, Fox was the highest-rated broadcast network in the...

 reality show in which two families, usually of different social classes, swap wives or husbands for a week. Each family is awarded $50,000, with the stipulation that the guest mother decides how her host family must spend the money. The title of the show is a play on the title of the television program Trading Spaces

Trading Spaces

Trading Spaces is an hour-long American television reality program that aired from 2000 to 2008 on the cable channels TLC and Discovery Home. The format of the show was based on the BBC TV series Changing Rooms. The show ran for eight seasons....

.

The show shares a very similar format to the Channel 4

Channel 4

Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...

 United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 (and subsequent ABC

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 remake) program Wife Swap

Wife Swap

Wife Swap is a reality television program, originally produced by UK independent television production company RDF Media and created by Stephen Lambert. It was first broadcast in 2003 on the UK's Channel 4. Since 2004, a US version has also been broadcast on the ABC network...

. In 2004, ABC showcased their upcoming Wife Swap show including projections of its popularity. Weeks before the show's debut, FOX introduced Trading Spouses. The producers of Wife Swap, RDF Media

RDF Media

Zodiak Media is a Anglo-American television production company. It was formed in 2010 when RDF Media Group was acquired by, and merged with Zodiak Entertainment...

, claimed FOX stole their concept, while FOX argued that TV shows have always borrowed from one another and that FOX simply beat ABC to delivery.

The show completed airing its third season on May 3, 2007. On February 27, 2008, FOX announced that it had sold the rights to Trading Spouses to CMT

CMT

- Medicine :* California mastitis test* Certified Massage Therapist* Cervical motion tenderness, a sign of pelvic inflammatory disease* Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease* Chemically modified tetracyclines* Circus Movement Tachycardia...

, effectively ending the series.