Kid Nation: A Bizarre Reality TV Experiment

by Nicholas Lemieux

At the dawn of the millennium, a boom of controversial Reality TV shows rapidly conquered television, introducing a whole slew of trashy television personalities, nasty arguments, constant backstabbing and overly-dramatic music played over relatively simple everyday things. Reality TV remains an intense grip over TV today, particularly with Love Island in its fourth season (personally, I prefer to refer to it as Superficial Island). Over the years, pretty much every single idea for a Reality TV show has been tried, tested and flopped as a result; however, one notable short-lived Reality show particularly surprised me with its   especially wayward concept, a premise which in retrospect seems somewhat disturbing.

Kid Nation aired on CBS in America in autumn 2007. The programme was advertised as a Lord of the Flies-inspired show, involving 40 children aged from eight to 15 spend 40 days in a desert ghost town in New Mexico and are tasked with constructing their own society from the ground up, complete with a government and no adult supervision (aside from the convenient camera crew). Right off the bat, upon its premiere, the show was swamped in controversy regarding the entire existence of this show, and how the idea of placing innocent children into a potentially dangerous, toxic, emotional scarring environment purely for the entertainment of viewers at home (and also the channel’s profit) didn’t exactly sit well with many people.

Reportedly, to allow their children to be on the show, the parents had to sign a overly specific 22-page waiver, specifically signing away “their rights to sue the network and the show’s producers if their child died, was severely injured, or contracted a sexually transmitted disease during the program’s taping”. In exchange, the kids were given $5000 to appear on the show (and for extra drama, at the end of every episode, the elect Kid Council would give one of the children a Gold Star worth $20,000. And that’s how you do capitalism kids!).

The first series was 13 episodes long. The show’s intention, according to host Jonathan Karsh (no, I don’t know him either) was for “kids to succeed where adults have failed”, a testament to show how kids can work together to construct the perfect society. Of course the show itself many relied upon kids doing excruciatingly difficult labour, being separated into rival classes, constant bickering and, as is inevitable with little kids, lots of crying from the homesick kids (surprisingly, only three of the 40 kids selected decided to go home, although that’s not to say  lots of the other ones didn’t suffer as well). There could be some serious juxtapositions at time as well, going from some of the little ‘uns setting up a daycare centre for stuffed animals, to transitioning to the kids reaching an intense moral dilemma when they have to decide whether or not to kill some of the chickens for food, including which poor soul should chop off the heads. Every episode also had the elected Council read a Journal for advice which is said to have belonged to the “ancient ancestors of the city” and definitely not a producer’s prop designed to instigate drama.

As is natural with kids, plenty of injuries occurred on the show, some more serious than others. On camera, one eleven year old girl ended up burning her face with hot grease whilst cooking, and off camera, four kids ended up drinking bleach (they lived, but still..). A show with a premise like this was of course going to end up liable to lawsuits. Kid Nation was advertised as a groundbreaking social experiment but at the end of the day its existence as a whole was very much questionable

Kid Nation was cancelled quickly enough after one season, primarily for legal reasons, and to this day remains more or less forgotten, just another fad of the Reality TV Age and as something of a cautionary tale regarding what happens when you put kids in an environment like this for entertainment values. All 13 episodes can be found on YouTube if you are at all morbidly curious. On one final note, I would also recommend reading a very interesting Q&A thread on Reddit from one of the former contestants on the show, which sheds some light over how some portions of the show were slightly staged and what effect the show overall had on some of the children.