With Josh on vacation, I've been nominated for the TV Club gold star. The main reason I think I deserve this gold star and a call home to Mom is because I watched Kid Nation last week and decided to continue watching it this week because I'm worried that if I don't watch, they'll kill the kids one by one.
The producers are setting up this week as "Greg Goes Rogue." Teenager Greg, who took charge when a chicken needed beheadin', didn't get the gold star last week and was subsequently filmed sitting menacingly on a rail fence. But instead we start with a rootbeer bash that the districts pooled their money to throw. It's nice to see the kids having fun pounding virgin boilermakers, but naturally there are some kid versions of Donna Bowman in the town who resent the revellers for disturbing their efforts to get a good night's sleep. "That's why this town got 'bandoned," moralizes Mallory primly. And sure enough, the party-pooping rulebook advises the council to institute some blue laws. What I thought might actually have been the kids' idea to combine their resources turns out to be the producers' idea of a tough life lesson.
Greg's anger and foul mouth are real enough, though. Without any parents around to enforce the "jobs" the districts have been given, with no threat of being voted off to deter bad behavior, there's not much reason for folks to do what they're supposed to do. But maybe that's the point — real communities rarely resort to exile, instead relying on social pressure to control deviance.
We get an insight into kid virtue theory when Colton gets termed, admiringly, "one of the toughest and bravest kids I've ever met in my entire life," for such feats as telling his friends to confront cows then run like hell. And when Colton himself walks right up to a threatening longhorn like some kind of matador, the biggest weakness of Kid Nation rears its ugly head. Nothing pulls the viewer out of the reality of a reality show like yelling at the screen, "Cameraman! Producion staff! Adults! Somebody intervene!"