Kid Nation Made This Adult Cry

Watching the debut episode of the new CBS series Kid Nation I was surprised at just how unsurprised I was by it. Kid Nation was hardly the nasty, child-abusive television certain parties had heralded it as. I found myself thoroughly entertained by the surprisingly together youngsters in the show. The children behaved on the whole pretty much exactly like, well children but the strength of the show is that there's real honesty on show here. When they're unhappy it's impossible for them to hide it. Tears and emotions run high but are usually short-lived. I was impressed with how arguments were dealt with fairly quickly and there is much you can take from the spectacle of kids trying to make a go of it.

Deprived of the comforts of 21st-century living, these adventurous little souls, ranging in age from 8 to 15, made what I'm sure was a fairly short desert trek pushing assorted carts to arrive at their kiddy-dodge ghost town. Almost immediately characters came to the fore. With four camp leaders ranging in age from 10 to 12 trying their best to cope with the impossibility of trying to get things organized. The main head-honcho a kid called 'Michael' is already defined as the down-trodden hero of the piece. Something akin to a min-Gregory Peck and whose heartfelt attempts to try and make things work out were truly tear-jerking at times. Add to this the tearful outbursts from some of the other kids, especially the younger ones and I found myself welling up at the raw emotion on show. For one 8 year old it was all too much and with much emotion he left the band of brothers at the first town meeting.

I was alternately moved from tears to actual laugh-out-loud laughter. Tears when the youngest of the kids poured out their hearts about missing family and friends and by the way, it's refreshing not to have to suffer contrived emotions the like of which you see on shows like 'Survivor', 'Big Brother', 'Biggest Loser' etc. and then unbridled laughter from the hysterical initial cooking attempts to a completely hilarious scene in the kids initial town meeting when unable to gain control of his audience one of the leaders 'Michael' gives a speech that falls completely flat leaving 'his people' in disarray. Luckily for him, from out of the crowd came a succession of boys, each with their own stirring little speeches to give. With each new boy came an even more stirring speech, but none quite managing to quell the raucous crowd. That is until the final boy's 'Martin Luther King' like epic. This kid should be a motivational speaker was all I could think. All this accompanied by suitably stirring music it was an overload of 'Little House on the Prairie' style emotion and a huge round of applause at the end.

I would imagine that the kids are being taped 24/7 & certainly there's a lot of video-tape to rummage through. Because there's so much footage to edit the show can be presented pretty much any way the producers choose. If you want things to look super-tough on the kids or easy-breezy it would be easy to just pick and choose those segments that fit into the storyline you want to push. I don't know whether the addition of the weekly prize of a 2lb Gold colored trophy equaling $20,000 is a good idea or not. It puts a game show element in play that might have been best left alone. So now we'll see youngsters playing against their true natures just to be awarded the prize for being good supporting players. But all in all I'd say this show offers a positive reflection of human nature. Showing the resilience, drive and surprising determination that a bunch of young kids can muster in the midst of a completely alien environment. Fingers crossed that it doesn't degenerate into Lord of the Flies.