I Can’t Watch Kid Nation
Did you watch the series premiere of Kid Nation last night — the show featuring 40 unsupervised kids trying to establish and run their own town?
I can’t bring myself to watch it. Call me close-minded if you will, but I refuse to support reality TV shows that turn childhood struggles into entertainment fodder for other folks. I don’t watch any of those Nanny-style shows for the same reason, and only caught a few minutes of Shaq’s show about fat kids by accident. That brief glimpse was enough to infuriate me, and I vowed to never watch anything like it again.
Oh, but I’ve heard plenty about it. It’s hard not to: Kid Nation is one of the most hyped shows on network TV these days, and critics are both panning and praising it. Says one:
There was a lot of disagreement and strife, and there were a number of moments — when a kid pulled a muscle, when they couldn’t figure out to cook pasta but were desperately hungry, when kids sobbed uncontrollably — that it seemed like an adult should step in. But then the kids figured out what to do, and even if the results weren’t perfect (the first-night’s dinner of macaroni and cheese did not look very appetizing at all), they made it work.
That’s supposed to be entertaining and “enlightening,” as one critic claims? It allegedly shows… just what, exactly?
That truly hungry children will eat just about anything?
That kids don’t instinctively know how to fend for themselves but will muddle through when they must?
That children can and will take care of themselves when adults abandon their responsibilities?
Louisiana Conservative says the show’s “genius” stems from the way it reminds viewers that children are more resourceful than we give them credit for. He wonders why people have a problem watching these kids when there are, in fact, so many adults around to keep an eye on things.
Perhaps that’s just the problem: adults watching children struggle then calling it “entertainment” sounds like little more than exploitation to me.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Haven’t seen it. Won’t watch it.
It reminds me of an overweight Sally Struthers walking among hungry third world children asking for my money.
I always felt like yelling- ‘why don’t you let them eat the crumbs off your dress?”
At least feed the kids while you’re telling me how I can help!!
Consider the outrage that would follow if someone separated a young animal from its mother (even if they nurtured it) for their own pleasure or amusement.
Maybe they’ll get hungry enough to kill and eat a producer or two- that might help the gene pool a bit. Wonder if the adults would find it prudent to intervene then?
Everything about this concept is offensive. Can you imagine being the kid who was sobbing, or turns out to be the bully, or does something stupid on national TV, and you have to live with that the rest of your life? Look where it got Monica Lewinsky, though surely that’s a bad analogy. What about the children’s privacy? We should all be entitled to screw up off-screen. (Unless we’re in the Oval Office.) And there’s more, more, more that’s wrong with this, as you so well reported.
With all the protections for filming children (not using newborns in movies, etc.) this seems like it found some kind of loophole. Surely there is a law against showing children eating each other….
Horrifying every way you look at it.
Kid Nation…
CBS’s newest “reality series” is the much talked about “Kid Nation.” The concept is basically that you throw a group of 40 kids, ages 8 - 15, together in a ghost town and wait until something happens. The few previews …
omigod…this sounds like a South Park episode.
I wrote up an entry this morning about how I cried throughout the episode. The mom in me was aching to see those kids so upset and sad.
Yep, that’s what kept me from watching, too, Colleen.
I can’t help thinking how fast the police and child services would show up and pitch a FIT over any Mom ignoring her crying, hungry children until they figured out how to cook for themselves, or waiting for them to figure out how to handle a pulled muscle, or any of the other things these kids have to figure out on their own.
But it’s OK if we call it “entertainment”?
Bah.
I love the way they are advertising the show as being “most talked about” as if the reason it is being talked about is something other than what a bad idea it was.
I was offended by the concept to begin with. But when I’m watching my kids’ entire school reeling with the pain of tragedy in one of our most involved families, it makes me SICK that people are willing to consider the emotional pain of children entertainment.