Fall TV Review: Kid Nation

The premise of Kid Nation is that 40 kids will be living in a ghost town in New Mexico called Bonanza city. They have chores, shops, social classes, a half assed political structure and tons of teleprompters to encourage these kids to say intelligent things.

Kid Nation is an example of the degradation of society in many ways. First, the entire concept of putting 40 kids in an environment to supposedly fend for themselves is almost as bad as live executions. It is seriously showing how our culture is nothing but a bunch of hedonistic crazy fools.

I found myself on my favorite website forum last night watching as a bunch of grown men did a live play by play of the show, while I watched the show and I found the different types of people on the show. You could almost tell that certain people would be prostitutes, while others would be business men, and yet others would go nowhere in life and end up in prison for murder.

When wikipedia entries about the show talk about how they accidentally drank bleach from unmarked soda cans, it raises questions about the entire show such as

1: Why would the producers allow bleach to lay around in unmarked soda cans?
2. Did all the kids not smell the bleach when they opened said bottles/

Seriously, I'm pretty sure the entire cast with the exception of Jared and Sophia are a bunch of meatheads, and even if Jared isn't stupid he seems reminds me of a young Dexter. If you haven't seen the show Dexter, about a serial killer with a conscience, you must buy a subscription to Showtime immediately.

Watching a survivor-kids type show would have been great if they hadn't been forced to form teams and abandon the initial "Lord of the Flies" like behavior to form teams like every other reality show and just destroy the concept we'd been promised.

The entire show seems scripted and although that might not be a problem for most viewers, I don't want to hear 10 year old kids making comments about things they can not possibly understand, I want to see 10 year old kids struggling to survive in a slave labor like environment while a gang of 15 year old kids beats them up and steals their lunch money. I want to see said 10 year old kids band together and build a trap for the 15 year olds, and then get kicked off the show for being violent. That is what would would entertain me, not watching kids try to decide whether an outhouse is a more important asset than a television set.

I don't want to hear Jared compare his desire to eat to Martin Luther King's I have a dream, or 11 year old girls crying because they don't like to do dishes. I want to see a battle with bandits trying to steal other people's property. I want the town to split and have a war.

The reality is this. Every week, the same people will dominate and the younger kids will end up leaving. The show will get abysmal ratings and everyone will cry about how Jericho was so much better, but in the end Kid Nation will go on to become a hit and we'll see shows like "Opposite World" where 40 kids boss 40 grownups around each week, or Iraqi Kid Nation.