For those of you who are always upset and whining about the lack of family programming on television, you hopefully checked out the recent CBS reality series Kid Nation. I put off commenting about the show during it’s run mainly because I had this suspicion that it would turn out to have a phony, manufactured ending-like, for example, series bad girl Taylor winning the last “gold star” and turning out to be a “good kid” at the end. This, of course, would have been lame, and an obvious set-up.
Well, it did not turn out that way, so my concerns were unjustified. Nevertheless, from all indications, the show will return. When and if it does, I recommend it as good “family fare”. Yeah, it is kind of silly. The concept is something along the lines of “Lord Of The Flies” meets “Our Gang”, in a reality series format. A group of kids-in the first season there were forty of them, ranging in ages from eight to fifteen-inhabit an abandoned western mining town known as Bonanza City, somewhere in the desert of New Mexico, and run it with minimal adult supervision.
A gold star is awarded at the end of each episode, by the town council (four kids elected by all the kids to represent four competing divisions) according to who made the most valuable contribution to the community. Each gold star was worth twenty thousand dollars and went toward the child’s college fund. There were four color-coded districts, representing leaders, merchants, cooks, and workers, and a contest in each episode determined what color group was awarded which district.
It was a kind of race, and if all four groups completed the task, they got the choice of a special prize for the entire community, usually a choice of some practical, utilitarian item or some more fun, kid type prize. Usually, but not always, the town council picked the more practical item. To me, though, the so-called practical choices were in some cases not so practical. Books, for example, don’t seem too practical in a situation where everyone is expected to work so many hours a day in a community that is basically a temporary setting. The town council chose the books, and I would be willing to wager that a grand total of one chapter per child on average was read, if that.
In the series finale, three extra gold stars, worth fifty thousand each, were awarded to three different kids who the council decided were the overall best in certain categories throughout the series run.
This series came under a good deal of criticism, for the most part before it even aired, from the screaming meemies of society shouting out accusations of child abuse. That pretty much went by the wayside after the show actually aired.
A word of caution, however-these are by no means “regular kids”. You can make book on the fact that when kids are recommended and approved for appearances in this type of project, they usually come from the upper strata of society, at the very least from the so-called “upper middle class”. One of the kids, on the show’s web site, lists the person she admires most in the world as King Mohammed of Morocco-where she and her family vacations every year.
You get the idea. These are not kids, for the most part at least, whose families are in danger of being thrown out on the streets at the slightest downturn of the economy. Still, in a general sense, this prime time network program is worth watching with the kids and its even fun at times. Some scenes are even funny, if somewhat contrived. In one of the episodes I watched, one little boy who missed his mother and his girlfriend went into the saloon to “have a root beer and get it off my mind.”
Yeah, like I said, some things seem kind of lame and made up. But, as long as there are shows like this, people can’t really complain about the lack of family programming. What it all boils down to is the people that usually make these kinds of complaints generally don’t want anything BUT this kind of programming-which would be really fucking annoying.
One thing to bear in mind is, these were generally pretty smart kids. Yes, they performed well and most of the time made the most appropriate choices, so adults can point to these kids as “good role models” (with some exceptions). Nevertheless, these kids were also intelligent enough to understand that their parents, and a good deal of the country, would be watching them at some vague future date on prime time network television. I wouldn’t be too quick to be handing out any gold stars.
