The train wreck that is ABC's Wife Swap has finally come off the rails.
Production shut down on the mismatched-family reality series this week as a husband featured in an upcoming episode was arrested and charged with punching his 13-year-old daughter in the face.
Yanni Panagiotakis of Nashville was charged with domestic assault late Tuesday. Police say that Panagiotakis, 38, was with his daughter en route to a friend's house. When they arrived, they were met by a camera crew for the series. Crew members noticed injuries to the girl's face and she told them that her father had hit her several times because she was not wearing a coat.
Producers of the show and ABC were shaken by the incident.
"The well-being of all participants in Wife Swap is a top priority," the network said in a statement. "At first realization the daughter of the Nashville family needed medical attention, producers immediately sought treatment for her."
The crew brought the girl to a hospital for treatment and X-rays. After she was cleared for release, the Wife Swap team took the girl and her nine-year-old brother in a local hotel accompanied by a representative of Tennessee's Department of Children's Services until their mother returned.
In the meantime, Panagiotakis was booked and released on $1,000 bail.
Panagiotakis, who owns a restaurant in Nashville, has refused to comment on the arrest. His wife, Dina, who had been on location with a family in California for the show and returned after her husband was charged, told the Nashville Tennessean Thursday, "Please leave us alone so we can get our lives back together."
Wife Swap has been a source of controversy for ABC since it debuted in September. The premise of the show, based on the runaway British hit of the same name, is that two women from different backgrounds exchange families for two weeks. The first week, each woman lives the other's lifestyle; the second week, the women impose their own rules on their surrogate families.
Despite the success of the U.K. original, the U.S. version is only proving a modest performer, averaging around 9.3 million viewers a week.
Since its debut in September, the show has faced mild criticism from conservative groups and television critics. The show was also at the center of a legal battle when its British producers sued Fox for allegedly ripping off their concept with Trading Spouses.
And just last week, the New York Times ran an article alleging Wife Swap producers supplied participants with material to read aloud, rehearsed pivotal confrontations off-screen and even reenacted key scenes that cameras missed.
Wendy Roth, a coexecutive producer on the show, defended the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, telling the Times, "There is a certain amount of poetic license."
ABC says that production on the episode featuring the Panagiotakis family will not resume and the installment will not be broadcast. ABC will decide whether to renew the series by mid-May, when it presents its fall schedule to advertisers.
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