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As the writers’ strike continues, Creative Loafing has assigned itself the unenviable task of watching the dreck the networks are pumping out. We will do this until it hurts. Then we will do it more.

Wife Swap (8 p.m., ABC)

As far as I can tell, there are two root problems with Wife Swap, ABC’s reality show about family dysfunction and the woman’s role therein.

The impossibly idealistic premise is one: Two families, of contrasting backgrounds and value systems, trade matriarchs for several days in an effort to see what they’re missing and/or appreciate what they already have.

Then there’s the inherent letdown: Wife Swap isn’t kinky.

If a title like that isn’t on the Spice channel, what’s left? The dated idea that all of a household’s foibles can be illuminated simply by bringing in a new woman.

Want an example? Try last night’s Flynn/Orris encounter on for size.

The Missouri-based Flynns are a rowdy bunch with three priorities: “fun, fun, fun.” We see this in mom Michelle, a brunette walrus with a penchant for TPing houses, a permasmile and a charming husband named Patrick. Patrick works fewer hours than his wife, and sets an example for his two kids by farting, burping, throwing food and driving aimlessly around the suburbs in his golf cart. He was also, unfortunately, born for reality TV.

Over in Ohio, Mishelle Orris is a pasty hypochondriac who hopes phrases like “I’m a controlling person because my way is usually the right way” will somehow endear her to her brood. Her husband Terry is a former army guy who is also, apparently, Captain von Trapp. He blows a whistle to wake up his step-kids, and makes them do laps around the house when they don’t do their chores properly.

Sound upsetting on both counts? Just wait until they switch.

“We’re just a different class of people, I guess,” says Mishelle, on wading through the Flynn lagoon for the first time.

“But don’t you ever stop to smell the roses?” Michelle asks Terry, when he makes 14-year-old Justin “drop and give me 20” for slacking a bit on chores. “Even when the roses are dirty?”

Things are off to a predictable start — until the two wives start enforcing their own rules, inadvertently detonating the husbands.

“You fat piece of trash!” shouts Patrick at Mishelle, storming off to his golf cart. She’d just asked 9-year-old Jessica to help fold a shirt. “From now on, your name is Sasquatch.”

“He thinks his big mouth is gonna intimidate me,” Mishelle tells the camera. “His teeth look very loose when he speaks.”

Under Michelle’s tutelage, the Flynn kids learn to “have fun,” which I guess means TPing their house, never cleaning anything and playing pranks on Dad.

“My punishment was letting you in the house,” says Terry to Michelle.

Then, ABC introduces a fantasy element. It isn’t swinging.

In record time, Patrick gets a personality makeover and suddenly starts telling the cameramen how much he’s learned to appreciate his wife. “When it comes to the bottom line,” he says, he should help his wife more around the house. “I might get a little more action, I don’t know.”

He also gives Mishelle the best apology in the history of losers: “I wish my wife would gain 200 more pounds, know what I’m saying?”

For his part, Terry sprouts a sense of humor. “Michelle is a big kid and maybe I forgot how to be a big kid, too,” he says, flexing a grin so hypoxic my screen is still having seizures.

We even get an update: Weeks after the families are reunited, Father Flynn is folding laundry alongside his wife.

All is revitalized in the house of Orris as well. “We’ve taken it down a notch, and are not sweating the small stuff,” explains Mishelle, back in Ohio.

Heartwarming stuff, if you buy it. Still, there’s one small concern neither wife seems to be sweating, a question I think we’d all like answered before we can accept the transformation:

How the hell did these two prehistoric, slave-driving, suicide-inducing fucknuts ever find wives to begin with???

Supernanny (9 p.m., ABC)

Meet Jo Frost, a young, straight-shooting, British child psychologist who likes to masquerade as Mary Poppins. Why? Because she’s gimmicky like that.

Her reality show, an hour-long behavioral-Gestalt therapy sesh called Supernanny, follows Frost as she meets, counsels and ultimately heals families with horrible children. It was such a big hit in England a few years ago that the host took her feel-good show across the pond, where, I guess, her gimmicky accent could be exotified to its full gimmicky potential.

“They remind me of bloody dogs!” she exclaims, flaring her Cockney in the episode I witnessed last night. She’s just met Terri and Brian Schumacher, an unusually submissive Las Vegas couple whose genes somehow combined to give them Gremlins. Jessica, 14, is a materialistic trophy wife-in-training who repeatedly faults her parents for raising her “in a dump.” Alexi, 11, is a narcissistic kewpie who likes to Internet chat with older men in her free time.

Dylan, 7, is Stalin. Just … Stalin.

Terri and Brian are the kind of people who will do anything to be loved — hence the dog comparison — but aren’t self-aware enough to realize it yet. They cater to the kids, cook them whatever they want, work crazy hours to give them whatever they want. In one scene that I’m sure will force Dylan/Stalin to change his name one day, he asks his mom to wipe his ass when he’s done in the loo.

“It’s slack parenting,” chides Frost. “It’s irresponsible parenting.”

Using her trademark positive-reinforcement technique, we watch Ms. Poppins intervene. Basically, it’s a one-step process: She introduces everyone in the family to a little system called “Discipline and punish.”

Penalizing the kids is hard for the parents, and they flub things up a bit. When Frost takes the whole family on a retreat with Habitat for Humanity workers to inoculate the money-grubbing tykes with a social conscience, Jessica fires back.

“I wasn’t expecting to go there and dig dirt and stuff,” she seethes.

Mom starts yelling back. Why isn’t the twit learning her lesson?

Lucky for Jessica, Nanny is a lot more actualizing — “I just wanted to take a different approach,” she says — and brilliantly, get this, talks to her like a grownup in her room during a weird slumber party scene with a lot of controlled whispering that totally went over my head.

Somehow, in the course of an hour, everyone ends up cured, and the family is reborn healthy, organized and mercifully free of late Soviet dictators.

Now, if only Frost could teach them to take biscuits with their tea, the show might actually be worth watching again.

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