Kid Nation: An Introduction

This season's newest reality television offering "Kid Nation" certainly hasn't suffered from a lack of publicity. Indeed, it's been virtually impossible to look at the news without seeing a new angle on the show, and the media attention the program has been garnering hasn't been that positive. But is the criticism merited?

The concept is this: 40 kids, ranging in age from eight to fifteen, "rebuild a town" (a former ghost town called Bonanza City once used as a movie set for Western films as recently as the 1980s); of course, the show isn't a documentary series, so there is some degree of artificial structure imposed on the proceedings.

Truth be told, it's more like "Survivor for Kids." There's a Jeff Probst-lite host who pops in and provides instructions and commentary from time to time, introducing the various team-building games that also determine where each of the four color-coded teams (inexplicably referred to as "districts") will fall in the four-tiered caste system that the producers have arbitrarily imposed. Laborers, at the bottom of the food chain, get a generous salary of ten cents for washing dishes, doing laundry and cleaning outhouses; on the other hand, the "upper class" gets a dollar to do nothing (allegedly they can "pitch in as they see fit").

But what's money without something to spend it on? Again, inexplicably there are three fully-stocked shops in the middle of town--a candy store, a "dry goods" store (more like an Old West toy store than anything), and a "soda saloon," all to be run by the "merchant" class (one step below the "upper class"). The prices have been adjusted to fit the salaries, thankfully.

So what of the controversy, then? I can't help but wonder if most of it is nothing more than hot air. Considering that 40 kids were largely left unsupervised for the better part of two months, shouldn't we regard it as a miracle that none of them was seriously injured (one child was mildly burned by some hot grease; two others accidentally drank a tiny bit of bleach, but didn't even require any treatment)? I, personally, am quite impressed by the kids' resilience and determination--in fact, the kids are allowed to decide to go home every few days, and only one particularly homesick 8-year-old decided to exit during the first episode.

So what, then, do the parents think? Apparently they feel it was a worthwhile endeavor. On a recent interview on the CBS Early Show, a couple of the parents of two of the participants encouraged the wider viewing public to give the show a chance, and they both emphasized that all of the parents knew exactly what they were getting into, even meeting with the show's executive producer before production began. The parents even noted that they had a chance to let their own lawyers review the production contract; when Harry Shearer noted that the contract said that the parents wouldn't be able to sue CBS if their children died, they didn't even flinch, noting it's just "standard contract" boilerplate: "When Mark goes out skateboarding at the skate park, I have to sign a contract that says I won't sue them if he dies, too, so I'm not going to make light of the language in the contract, but it really is standard," she said.

So if the parents of the participants, who, from what I can tell, seem to be level-headed, caring individuals, were OK with this process, why in the world has the show garnered so much negative attention? It's hard to say, but the formula for the show seems to work, even just one episode in. We'll see where it goes in the coming weeks.