Shalom in the Home

Feeling confused by all the swapped wives, traded spouses, and super nannies? Meet Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. His new self-help reality series, Shalom in the Home, means to dissect the dilemmas facing the new nuclear family, looking for ways to stave off misunderstandings and other meltdowns. Driving down the road with an Airstream trailer, our response-ready rabbi camps out in his subjects’ driveways, using hidden cameras to observe bad behaviors and from there, prescribe fixes.

Sometimes, the situation is simple (parents disrespect their children and get the same back in spades). Other problems are buried under years of habit and deception. Sadly, Shmuley is only available for a week, and even with his friendly if forceful approach, he can barely scratch the surface. Still, Shalom in the Home manages to be entertaining, if not enlightening.

It helps that Rabbi Boteach is a compelling figure. Unlike other experts preaching the word of “God,” he explains why spirituality matters and encourages individuals to mold religious doctrine to fit their needs. Since his days as rabbi at Oxford University, Shmuley has been working his way toward stardom. Some see his hobnobbing with celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Roseanne Barr as detrimental to his effectiveness as a teacher. It is hard to claim humility with the limelight staring you in the face.

But others value Shumley’s advice on relationships and physical love. He’s even written a bestselling book on the subject, Kosher Sex. In his view of Judaism, the Word is a way of guiding listeners toward solutions, not aggravating difficult situations. He’s even found a way to articulate his ideas in “Shmuleyisms,” advice in digestible bites. Unfortunately, little of this thought-provoking tactic is visible in Shalom in the Home, the better to focus on the squabbling siblings and bickering parents.

In the pilot, Shmuley faced a family broken by two familiar problems, money and adultery. A pair of childhood sweethearts, Beatriz and Luis Romero divorced after 17 years of marriage. Luis says financial frustrations caused him to stray, and Beatriz remained defensive as they negotiate regarding their four children. As he entered the fray, Shmuley faced a couple of complications. Both parents were seeing other people, and harbored hard feelings over the breakup.

The rabbi’s answer was to reinstate the original family dynamic, boyfriends and girlfriends be damned. Through counseling and emotional exercises, Shmuley exposed the love still left behind. Though his advice often sounded like psychobabble, once in a while, Shmuley showed himself to be effervescent, irreverent, and slightly askew.

Things weren’t so easy in Episode Two, however. Here, our happy holy man faced Ro Gordon. Abandoned as a baby by her mother, married once and divorced, she was driving away her new husband Roy and their cobbled together collection of kids with her demanding and demeaning. Ro spent her days struggling to keep her house as neat as possible. She complained incessantly about the lack of help, but then admonished anyone who tried to help. She had everyone on personal pins and needles, lambasting them furiously for even the smallest mistake.

As Shmuley watched his monitors, you could see his resolve dissipating, as nothing had prepared him for Ro’s routine of ridicule. And when Roy turned out to be a know-it-all stepdad (with an uncomfortable attachment to his biological son), the effort seemed destined to fail. Shmuley began his intervention with a pleasant confrontation, pointing out what was obvious to even his subjects. Then he attempted to upset the standard household procedures by mixing in a little role-play and responsibility reversal.

But Ro was so set in her ways that she actually got worse. Her anger became more focused and her criticism more cutting. By the end of the show, she resolved to try, but we never saw that next step. A visit three weeks later confirmed at our fears. Ro was less intense, but still wielded most of the parental power. Roy was less obsessed with his little baby boy, but the older boy, Peter, was still feeling underappreciated.

At times like these, Shalom in the Home feels especially superficial. While shows about family dysfunction are nothing new, Shmuley’s attempted adjustments are disturbingly ineffective. In fact, the series spends more time showing breakdowns than his work with each family (he would be better in a Dr. Phil-like role, one on one conversations, without the hidden video highlight reel). If there was ever someone who could make religion seem relevant to reality tv, it would be Rabbi Shmuley. But Shalom in the Home is more interested in exploiting the pain than healing the problem.