The premiere of Kid Nation was tonight! The show where 40 children, age 8-14, “will build their own new world, pioneer-style.” I can’t bring myself to do a full review of the episode. Why? It was boring. It was a bunch of kids, who fight, cry, and then fight. But here’s some quick comments, anyone who watched the show please add to it:

• This show started with a LOT of crying. I want to be in the editing studio while CBS producers watch the rough cuts. Can they really sit around and say: “Nice! Get that close-up of the little kid crying because he hasn’t eaten. Awesome. America will love this.”??!?
• Next point: Aren’t the kids actually surrounded by adults? I mean, aren’t there fifty cameras, sound crew, construction people? It’s not like these kids have been abandoned. I don’t think CBS would let them die.
• Speaking of abandoned, what were the parents of these kids thinking?
• WHY did the show insert a class structure? For those who missed it, they forced the kids to be divided into laborers, cooks, store workers (or something like that) and the upper-class, and get paid differently for their different chores. Didn’t this kind of ruin the experiment?!? Maybe the kids would have come up with some Marxist utopia. I bet they’d at least have universal health care. At the very least, I was expecting that the show’s hook would be the prospect of some nightmarish child-government scenario, think 1984 or Lord of the Flies. Instead we get a lame structure imposed from above that makes good little capitalists.
• A gold star worth $20,000 is given out every council meeting to a kid whom the council decides ‘deserves it’. If there’s ever a recipe for a boring show it’s to create a huge financial incentive for everyone to cooperate. Booooring. It’s like Survivor: Mr. Rogers.
• When you really think about it, how could this show ever be popular? Think of the two possibilities: Either this show will be about kids cooperating and the audience will fall asleep, OR the producers will put the kids in horrible situations and outrage America. To me, that’s a lose-lose situation CBS.
• And then Jimmy. Oh Jimmy. Eight year-old Jimmy (click to see his ‘bio’) who said “I’m not old enough for this. I’m only eight!” and then he took himself out of the game because he missed his mom and dad. We’ll miss you Jimmy. But in my books, you won.