CBS Affils Should Secede From 'Kid Nation'

This week, we offer the opposite advice, examining a rare example of a show that stations should actively avoid.

Again, this is not about popularity. You already have a pretty good idea about which new fall shows are a long shot at best.

While it’s a no-brainer to withhold resources from shows voted Least Likely to Succeed, it’s harder to identify the potential hits that conceal a serious downside.

This season, the Most Shunworthy Show is without question Kid Nation, set to premiere on CBS on Sept. 19. This is a show so toxic that if it wins, the affiliates lose.

Here’s a synopsis of the show, condensed from the network’s own press release (for the full version, click here):

Kid Nation is a reality-based series in which 40 kids have 40 days to (rebuild) Bonanza City, N.M., a ghost town that died in the 19th century. These 8-to-15 year olds spend more than a month without parents or modern comforts. They cook meals, clean outhouses, haul water and even run their own businesses. They'll also create a government—four kid leaders who guide the group, pass laws and set bedtimes.

Through it all, they'll cope with regular childhood emotions and situations: homesickness, peer pressure and the urge to break every rule they've ever known.

At the end of each episode, all 40 kids gather to debate the issues facing Bonanza City. They'll show wisdom beyond their years and the unflinching candor that only kids can exhibit.

There are no eliminations on Kid Nation—you only go home if you want to. Kids may raise their hands and leave.

Will they stick it out? Will they come together as a cohesive unit, or abandon all responsibility and succumb to the childhood temptations that lead to round-the-clock chaos?

So what’s wrong with that? It teaches some kids the virtues of democracy and hard work, it celebrates the pioneer spirit, and it’s a character-building opportunity not unlike Outward Bound.

In fact, it’s easy to imagine creating promotional tie-ins with such family-friendly advertisers as fitness centers, travel agencies and even supermarket chains.

If you do, you’ll regret it. Here’s why.

Critics have lined up to lambaste Kid Nation, and not just the TV writers. The most caustic comments come from psychologists, labor lawyers and child welfare activists, and they zero in on four categories:

Kid Nation violates child labor laws. This first came to light in James Hibbard’s excellent TV Week story, which documents the legal contortions required to find a location that would permit working children “from dawn to dusk and then some,” according to Hibbard. The producers chose NewMexico, a few months before that state closed an embarrassing loophole that exempted film and television productions from child labor laws.

“We didn’t have statutes that said they can’t work a child 10 hours a day, so we hoped that [productions] would do what’s best for the children,” said Tiffany Starr-Salcido, who specializes in child workplace rights at the New Mexico Department of Labor.

Kid Nation’s Emmy-winning Executive Producer Tom Forman further evaded child protection laws with another shrewd strategy: “They’re not ‘working.’ They’re living and we’re taping what’s going on. We were essentially running a summer camp. That’s the basis behind every [legal] document for the show.” Right. A “summer camp” that paid participants a $5,000 “stipend” plus potential prize money, and required parents to sign extensive waivers and confidentiality agreements.

Kid Nation was inherently damaging to the children involved. Former child star Paul Petersen, founder of the child advocacy group A Minor Consideration, asks “Who, exactly, was ‘standing by’ this so-called ‘summer camp’ when all the publicity says the piece was done without adult interference?” According to producer Forman and CBS, there was an extensive “adult safety net” stationed “nearby” that included a psychologist, medical personnel, a nutritionist, but mainly production crew members.

Petersen remains skeptical. “What are the credentials of this so-called adult safety net? What were they paid and who paid them? If this was really a ‘camp,’ who did the background and fingerprint checks of the production team? The laws for ‘camps’ for children are pretty strict in every jurisdiction I know.”

Kid Nation lacked true “informed consent.” Child psychologists have long postulated that it is inherently impossible for children to grant “informed consent” to reveal details of their personal lives in academic articles, let alone commercial entertainment. There is ample evidence kids lack the capacity to see the long-term consequences of sacrificing their privacy.

Speaking of Kid Nation, psychologist Geoffrey White told ABC News, “Any psychologist working on this production would be unprofessional at best and unethical at most.” This from a man who has worked on a dozen reality shows, including ABC’s The Mole. White said that one of Kid Nation’s worst ethical abuses was asking parents to consent to filming without knowing the exact production details. “Informed consent is not a foolproof process,” White said. “These shows are coercive and use the manipulative power of group pressure to bring out the worst in people.”

That’s not to mention a child’s inability to foresee the arsenal of production techniques “reality” producers use to exaggerate or manufacture “heroes,” “villains” and phony conflicts to enhance dramatic storylines.

Kid Nation is a fraud. The show’s publicity boasts how the children are boldly “attempting to do what their forefathers could not—build(ing) a town that works” on the ruins of Bonanza City. Oops. Turns out that aside from a couple of aging shacks, nearly all of Bonanza City was built in the last 20 years for the filming of Silverado and other westerns. Ironically, this deception, plus the secret posse of responsible adults, may be Kid Nation’s most redeeming qualities. It means the children were never entirely in mortal danger.

And where do professional TV critics stand on Kid Nation? The Washington Post’s Lisa de Moraes writes “Not since Amish in the City have TV critics lavished so much hate on a reality series during a press tour Q&A session." She then proves the point with a scathing account of that critical exchange. Newsday’s Diane Werts likens the show’s participants to “such tragic died-young kid stars as Dana Plato, Anissa Jones and River Phoenix.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Rob Owen says “the show calls into question the parenting of anyone who allowed their child to participate … but the network is on the hook, too, for creating the inducement.”

Owen fairly points out that “critics shouldn't judge the show until we see a full episode—only clips have been screened so far.” (To judge those clips for yourself, click here.) But Owen adds “the concept alone is troubling for the obvious reason that it seems as though the show's entertainment value is based on exploiting children who are not acting, but appearing on TV as themselves.”

Just out of curiosity, I wondered what the Parents Television Council had to say about Kids Nation. As it turns out: nothing—not a word to be found anywhere on the PTC Web site. Apparently the PTC doesn’t think alleged child abuse-as-entertainment poses as great a threat to family values as the occasional F-word or a glimpse of Janet Jackson’s nipple.

I have a good many friends in the CBS marketing and PR departments whose work and judgment I greatly respect. I don’t envy them the task of promoting this time bomb. If this show succeeds, it will further confirm the public’s suspicion that, unregulated, broadcasters will stoop to anything for ratings.

Kid Nation was widely reported to be the pet project of CBS “reality guru” Ghen Maynard, who famously badgered Les Moonves to give Survivor a chance on the CBS schedule. But it fell to CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler to defend the show from the TV critics’ onslaught: “In order for a reality show to really get out there and change the landscape of television, you have to stir public debate,” she said. “We knew we were going to create some controversy …. I don’t want it to have a negative connotation.”

Yeah, good luck with that. Unlike Survivor which, for good or ill broke new ground in genre, storytelling and videography, Kid Nation’s appeal is based chiefly on its shocking premise. Ethically, it shares more in common with Fox’s colossal bad idea, a show based on O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.

CBS affiliates might want to similarly pressure the network to reconsider their plans for this project. And not just for ethical reasons. As an added bonus, Kid Nation could get you sued.

A Minor Consideration’s Paul Petersen is effectively accusing the parents of Kid Nation participants of child abandonment and endangerment. “If they want redemption,” writes Petersen, “they should immediately ‘disavow’ the contracts, because their kids certainly can the moment they turn 18. If you did this for money, parents, consider what it would be like to own a good chunk of CBS, for that’s the potential prize.”

Can said parents and, eventually, the kids themselves also sue the stations who broadcast Kids Nation? Do you really want to find out?