Kid Nation

Hi, friends! My apologies, but it turns out that last week was the final blog for Kid Nation. For those of you still watching, I hope you enjoy the rest of the season!

Now go watch The Next Great American Band. I need some comments over there, too!

And thanks for your comments these past few weeks.

This is the toughest blog of the entire season for me. Why, you ask? Well, other episodes of Kid Nation might not have been great, but at least they were entertaining. This was a train wreck. So I stamp the big black advisory sticker over this first paragraph and tell you that if you are reading this and going to get annoyed by some negativity, then you might just want to stop now and come back next week. However, if you also thought this week was a train wreck, by all means read to the end. The one thing I won’t do is lie to you and put a rosy spin on this blog just for the heck of it. I am nothing if not honest, so my apologies to all who'll hate what’s to come. Every show is allowed a train wreck now and again, right? Right?

So let’s look at some of the reasons why this episode was bad.

The No. 1 reason has to be: Who the heck is Nathan? Yes, who is this kid? I don’t ever recall seeing him before, and tonight he wins a gold star. And does he have any expression other than indifferent? I know that’s a lot of questions all at once, but I think I’m entitled because I didn’t know he existed before this week. And you just have to love the conversation between Laurel and Nathan, which was totally scripted and ended up with Laurel saying that she wishes he wouldn’t grow up so fast. She’s known him for 20 days and she’s what, two years older? That’s a really funny statement for her to make, and Guylan said the same thing later. Weird.

Then there were the nominations for a gold star. Nominations? When did this happen? At no other point has there ever been nominations, unless they just haven’t shown them. I wondered what the heck Greg was talking about when he mentioned he might nominate Pharaoh, and then we saw. And then, either due to creative editing or what really happened, the entire city voted for Pharaoh except Greg, and the town council gives the star to Nathan. Why bother with the nominations if you clearly don’t care about what people say at all?

And how about this great $18.50 treasure?! Yeah, you know I’ll bet the original town members left it there for these kids. You just knew the fake treasure hunt was coming at one point, didn’t you?

One thing we’ve been talking about for weeks now is the creative editing, which this week just happened to have the kids saying their clothes aren’t getting clean enough and then having the showdown reward be washing machines. What a coincidence! Oh, and the gold-star winner is the main person doing this wash, which isn't getting clean enough.

But, there were actually two things that I did enjoy. One was the 10 seconds at the end where the girls had a fake fashion show. The other was Jared saying, “Holy banana bread.” My wife thinks Jared won’t get any nookie until he’s 35. I have to agree. And I’m leaving it at that.

Maybe next week I'll booze it up first so everything seems funny. Oh, c'mon, I know you're thinking about doing the same thing.

Until next week, friends.

Check out clips from Kid Nation in our Online Video Guide.

This week on Kid Nation, "The Taylor & DK Show."

This is truly getting out of hand with Taylor. The only way you can possibly like this girl is if you too are a lazy, whiny 10-year-old beauty queen. Every time I see her that song pops into my head, you know that one that goes, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife.... ” Can you just picture what this is leading to? Six years from now we’re going to see Taylor on that sweet-16 birthday show complaining about how she got an Escalade instead of the BMW that she wanted. Then a few years later, if she keeps her looks, she’ll win the heart of some 44-year-old man at one of her pageants and maybe she’ll get to be on a “reality stars” season of Real World/Road Rules Challenge. OK, I’m putting way too much thought into a girl I will thankfully never see again in a few months, but you see where I’m going.

Back to present day. I hope that she is watching this with her parents right now and seeing what a total debacle she is becoming. But of course, she has to be watching with someone who doesn’t believe her theory that beauty queens do nothing, so maybe her parents aren't the right audience, either.

I do love that the council tried to force her to do stuff and then punish her, but even then nothing seemed to work. When she flipped over the buckets of water and said, “Oops, my bad,” I’m surprised the kids didn’t go ballistic. I wanted to jump through the screen. I really hope Zach sticks to his plan of not paying her. In fact, I wish all business worked like that. You only get paid if you do your job. And speaking of going ballistic, when Anjay was holding the door shut, didn’t she try to kick him? On any adult reality show she would have been booted off or at least given a stern talking-to by the producers. But on this, one kids are allowed to attack other kids. I know, I know — kids will be kids. This is what kids do. I get it. Not the same thing as some Real World dude threatening to kill another guy, but still.

I was so disappointed when she decided to stay. But I was laughing when DK stood up and told the rest of the gang they needed to stop picking on Taylor and be more positive. Taylor took this like DK was her best friend and was supporting her. DK wasn’t standing behind her, he was just tired of all the crap, and it so happens that the doodoo was being laid on thick in the direction of Taylor. He would have said the same thing if anyone else was the target of the hatred. But let Taylor think what she wants. Clearly she does anyway.

The first half focused on Taylor and the second half focused on DK His “just chill” vibe is what more of these kids need to adopt. He got the kids moving to fill the water tank and has people looking up to him now. It’s a shame that these kids annoyed him so much that he almost left sans 20K, but it was nice to see someone other than Taylor on screen for a moment in any capacity. It’s truly as if 30 or so of these kids don’t even exist. There was a girl sitting next to DK in the award ceremony that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

Some points of interest for me this week:
• Guylan sounds really fake when he’s speaking to the camera. Almost like everything he says is off a cue card or it’s take No. 63. Fake or not, I loved it when he was talking about Taylor and said that they are going to show her what happens when you don’t do work — you get harder work. That’s Management 101 right there, baby. Give the harder work to the slackers. It either lights a fire under their butt or it moves them out the door. Win-win!

• The book told them to “clean out the trash bin.” What insight. I don’t know how they would have gotten by without that advice. The rats didn’t give it away, I guess.

• During the challenge, Anjay points out that he’s “not good at physical work because my bones are still forming.” Understood. But what does this have to do with shoving your hands in a pile of beans looking for a can? The kid wasn’t lifting bags of concrete, he was kneeling in beans.

• If Taylor goes home at some point, we have a new drama queen in waiting: Mike! He was a little overly dramatic about how nasty the pig thing was and later on he was screaming about something else. This kid has no filter, does he? If I were 12, I would totally beat this kid up at school.

• This was finally the week where they could choose the fun prize instead of the sensible one and not lose too much. So of course they chose what you could call the “right” one again. I’ve never seen kids this excited about a radish before. They really need something fun to do to get a little bit of the edge off, and I think the ATVs would have been a much better choice at this stage of the game. They still had food either way. Toothbrush, yes. Pomegranate, no.

Next week I think I’m going to go in trying to find something positive to say about Taylor. T-R-Y. Try.

Until next week, friends.

Check out more clips from Kid Nation in our Online Video Guide.

It’s about time the kids of Bonanza City got the chance to change the leadership of this city. We’ve been clamoring for this for weeks now. I have to admit that I was disappointed that each group only got to vote for their own leader. It makes sense in a way, but it would have been nice to see how the vote went if everyone voted for one person per team color. Bad for TV, good for Bonanza. At the same time, though, the elections went pretty well overall.

For Green, Laurel has been a good leader and the team was probably correct in leaving her in power. The only thing wrong with her this entire time was the lip thing. But nasty lips never prevented anyone from getting elected (or so I have to assume).

The Blue team reelected Anjay. He’s been decent as a leader but he needs to grow a thicker skin. Personally, I’m excited that Olivia didn’t get elected. Not only is she a pain in the rear but that face scares the daylights out of me. She was really on Anjay’s butt about a lot of things, and it really has affected the way he acts. I know he’s only a kid, but he needs to grow a pair. And Olivia needs a muzzle.

It seems a lot of you thought Mike should remain the leader, and I don’t really agree with that. I disliked the way he kept telling everyone to shut up. The kid just seemed a little too full of himself. I didn’t expect that he would only get one vote, though. Guylan made a good speech but really hadn’t got enough air time yet for me to seriously think he had a chance. Actually, I’m not even sure I knew he was a boy up until this point. Guylan certainly sounds kind of masculine, but I can’t be the only one that wondered that at some point. With all the crazy names going around these days, who knows? I mean, Apple Martin?

And then of course there’s the ousting of Taylor! Hooray! I have to admit, that after realizing that all the girls might vote for Taylor, I was kind of worried that Zach had no shot. But they showed that little confessional-type thing for one of the girls on Yellow at the end where she mentioned it was time for Taylor to move on. I’m impressed that being lazy didn’t trump being productive yet again. Zach made quite a speech. That kid has a future as some kind of public speaker. We’ll have to see if he can be a leader though. The magic 8-ball says, “All signs point to yes” for this one, but I have a slight bit of doubt. His statement at the end about making everyone’s idea a reality seems nice right now, but I just wonder if he’ll try to incorporate so many ideas that he’ll forget that he needs to reject bad ones as a leader. Still, it’s got to be better than Taylor.

My biggest question about all of this is: Do the kids on the council make any money? I mean, Laurel has no chance of winning a gold star and Zach just had his last chance to win one unless he gets voted out at some point. Maybe some of these kids are in it because they truly want to be leaders and make the town better, but then maybe kids like Greg didn’t run because they realized they couldn’t win $20,000 anymore. I wonder if during the final episode they’ll announce that for every section of time they were on the council they'd earned a certain amount of money. I don’t think I missed them saying this at some point, but if they did, please let me know.

The challenge tonight was pretty cool, too. Break open the piñatas and grab the presidential cards and put them in order from when they were president. I’m shocked the yellow team won this one, since they were the youngest kids and I figured they would have the hardest time putting the presidents in order. Then again, I have no idea when they teach kids the presidents these days. I’m also shocked the blue team had so many kids that just couldn’t crack open the piñatas. They did seem to have some bad luck in that the ones they did get open didn’t have any cards, but I would have thought the little girls on the yellow team would have had the biggest problems with that, too. It’s fitting, though, that Little Miss Prissy gets ousted from office and gets to finally be in the upper-class on the same day.

The one thing about this episode that really made my jaw drop is that these kids didn’t have toothbrushes or toothpaste. That might be even worse than giving them shot glasses. You’re telling me this entire time they haven’t brushed their teeth? So not only are their teeth rotting but their breath smells like the inside of a fake leg? How did Miss Diva deal with this one for so long?

And what, they don’t even bother asking if anyone wants to go home now?

Until next week, friends.

Don’t forget to head on over to our Online Video Guide for clips of Kid Nation .

Although I wasn't around last Wednesday night to recap, I did end up watching the episode on Saturday night and then reading all your comments. One of the things that's interesting now that we have a few episodes under our belts is that the show is really giving off a pretty negative vibe. I mean, 75 percent of the comments last week were negative in one form or another, from talking about Taylor, to Greg's attitude and the whole drinking-shots issue. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but don’t you get the feeling that it's much easier to point out the bad than the good? And that's driven by where the editing of this show is taking us.

Just the opening segment alone, where they have Taylor prominently saying "deal with it," gives you a great idea of what the show is trying to portray. The biggest comments from last week were Taylor's attitude and the kids drinking shots. And that was a good chunk of this week, too.

Taylor did nothing this entire episode. She didn't cook; she stood over the puzzle and yelled at people, she didn't get near the wheel to help lift up the puzzle, and she laughed in the faces of the people who were calling her lazy. The host is right on target with his comment at the end. Either she tunes people out or she has the thickest skin I've ever seen in a child. Every child I know would have been crying their eyes out by now. I want to hate her, but I can't hate a child. I can hate her values, her laziness and her arrogance, though. Somehow it makes me feel better to hate everything about the girl, but not the girl herself. Hey, if 15 years from now VH-1 is airing "I Love Taylor IV", then I'll hate her. Yeah, I'm buying into my own crazy logic on this one.

Then there's the shot issue. I have to tell you that I hate this. There's no rosey spin on this one. These kids are drinking their beverages out of shot glasses. How remarkably irresponsible are these producers? It's one thing to leave kids to fend for themselves, but it's another to toss shot glasses in front of them as if normal glasses don't exist. What's the oldest, 15? So give it two or three years before one of them experiments at a party with big bro's Wild Turkey, gets tossed in rehab and blames it on Kid Nation.

Then there's this show's whole religious vibe. I found it remarkable how strongly some of these young kids believed in their religion. I probably shouldn't be that shocked, but growing up in a nonreligious family it's weird to see 11-year-old kids so adamant about what they believe in. The most interesting comment throughout the whole group debate was when Laurel commented that people are being very "narrow-minded." Don't get me wrong, I see where she's coming from. The fact that some of these kids felt so strongly about not wanting to be in the same service with someone of a different faith can come across as narrow-minded. But wasn't the council being pretty narrow-minded itself in trying to force everyone to come to an overall service so they could learn about each others' religions? By the fact that no one came to the service, it's clear to see which train of thought won over. It's also nice to see the prayer circle afterwards. And of course, the very positive thing about the whole situation is that the group chose the Bibles as the prize. I really do think that one of these times they need to choose the fun prize and let themselves go a bit, but not in this case. Again, I'm not religious, but even I know that was the proper choice. But one of these times, the 40-foot water slide has to come out as a sanity check for the kids.

Now I want to get your opinion on something here. Supposedly, the overall goal of this show is to see if the kids can build a working town by the end, right? Was there one part of this episode that showed any step toward accomplishing that? In fact, how many steps toward that goal have we seen in the last few weeks? All I saw was a religious discussion, Taylor sitting around doing nothing and more dishes being washed. Are we done building up this town already? If so, are any of us going to be able to take many more weeks of just watching kids hold up dirty dishes? I kind of feel like I'm seeing the same thing over and over.

Anyway, Morgan did deserve the star this week, but Zach is certainly right on the verge. And you had to get all teary-eyed for Cody except for the fact that he misses his girlfriend. His girlfriend! Do 9-year-olds have girlfriends these days? Geez, I feel old.

Until next week, friends.

Check out more from Kid Nation in our Online Video Guide.

My apologies friends, but there will be no blog this week. Duty called at the job and unfortunately I was unable to watch it tonight. But I'll be back next week with a blog for you to chat up. But don't let that stop you from talking about the show yourself. Recap, comment etc... I open the string for you have at it.

Until next week, friends.

So there’s 39 kids left going into Day 5 and the first task they are greeted with is killing chickens for dinner. Quite predictably, the youngest of the kids think the chickens are cute and don’t want to kill them, while the older kids don’t seem to mind very much at all. Emelie leads the charge to save the chickens by locking herself in the chicken coop with a couple other kids and threatening to go home if they are killed. Older kids like Greg, who’s worked with a butcher before, want to have them for dinner. The council takes a vote and it's chicken tonight. They do actually kill the chickens, but not before they have another meeting to discuss it again. It didn’t harm anything this time, but if the council is going to bring something up for a vote, once it’s voted on they should really stick with that decision. A second meeting yielded the same results, but who knows what would have happened had the second meeting overturned the vote. But Taylor yelling out for the kids to raise their hands for “who wants to kill chickens”? That was a bit out of hand. I know that’s what they had to do, but maybe something like, “So who wants chicken for dinner?” would have been a little more tactful and might not have creeped out some of the younger kids so much.

Greg’s the kid who really stepped up with the chickens, though, as he was the one to cut the heads off. (Was it really necessary to show everyone at home the headless chickens, too?) Greg showed the others how to pluck them, gut them and cook them and really was the leader. Granted, he’s showing off because he wants the star, but he’s also just doing something he’s actually good at.

Day 6 brings the cold and the lazy. It’s freezing and the kids are shivering but all of them are up doing work except for Taylor and her crew. The only one working from the yellow team is Zach, who seems thoroughly embarrassed that the others are doing nothing. He comes back in to confront Taylor about staying in bed and she says, “So what?” because she’s cold and doesn’t want to move.

Michael goes to get some water and finds the pump is frozen solid, so he gets a couple of other guys and pours hot water into it to break up the ice. Smart.

Then there’s the contest. The four teams have one hour to run pipe through an outhouse, a barrel, other pipes and into a water wheel to get it moving. If they all do it in an hour they get to choose between a 45-foot heated water slide and whatever's under barrel No. 1.

Blue wins the contest thanks to Greg, who’s worked with PVC pipe with his dad and clearly has a future with the Blue Man Group. The red team finishes second, yellow is third again, and green is last. But unlike the first week, green never finished, so they don’t get the prize at the end, which also could have been a bunch of water pumps.

On Day 7, the yellow team are still the cooks and still doing nothing. This time, quite a few kids are noticing. Sophia brings it up in the council meeting and Taylor starts complaining about how young they are and how cold it is and then makes jaws drop when she says that because the young kids don’t have cooking skills, everyone is going to have to starve.

For the presentation of the gold star, it rightfully comes down to Greg and Michael. Michael’s doing the work to help the town while Greg is doing it to get money. Mike gets this more than anyone and thus seems to be able to convince the others to give it to Michael. That seems like the right choice to me, though whatever the motive may be, Greg really stepped it up. But now Greg’s ticked off and claims he’s going to do something about it. We’ll have to see what that means. And not even Emelie goes home, so we still have 39 kids.

A couple of observations and questions:

How long is it going to take before the kids realize they should help the last-place team in the challenge? After the third team finishes, what’s stopping the other kids from jumping in and helping the last-place team? It’s not affecting the outcome for the jobs and it would certainly help them get the big prize. Two down and no help yet.

Not sending someone home after each episode makes this very interesting. Emelie told people she wanted to go home if they killed chickens. Granted, these are kids and they probably don’t think this way, but wouldn’t her going home be a good thing? That’s one less person to have to fight off for the gold star. I know the end result here is to see if they can run a town and it’s probably better to have as much help as possible, but it’s not like the star goes down in value for everyone who goes home. Now that would make it fun.

We’re through Day 7 and unless it didn’t make the cut, not once have the kids been asked if they wanted to remove a council member. Taylor clearly doesn’t belong on the council, but they’ve yet to have the opportunity to vote her out, even though at the beginning of the season it sounded like they would have that chance.

After winning the challenge, one member of the blue team hugged the host. I’ll bet you Jeff Probst is watching this wondering where his love is.

Until next week, friends.

Check out Kid Nation clips in our Online Video Guide.

Welcome to the first Kid Nation blog!

I’m assuming that just like me, you are watching this show and reading this blog because the overall concept of this is just so crazy that you had to at least give it a shot and see what all the hype was about.

Forty kids building a town from scratch with no parents is intriguing. I can’t really tell yet if this is going to be a total debacle or the feel-good story of the year but something tells me there’s going to be no middle ground. Either you are going to be put off by all these chaotic kids talking over each other or you’re going to love how cute and cool they are. I’ll reserve full judgment for a few episodes to get used to the concept, but I’d certainly like to hear your first impressions on the quality.

So 36 of these kids are bussed in and then four others are flown in and made the town council. I assumed the show would start off with the kids picking their own town council, but having even the slightest bit of organization from the beginning was probably very smart.

The council consists of Anjay, who is supersmart and seems pretty grounded so far; Taylor, a beauty queen who absolutely does not do dishes; Laurel, who claims she only cares about her own views but then seemed wicked cool; and Mike, who immediately comes across as the kid with the inflated ego who only likes to give orders but does nothing himself.

Then there’s the rest of the kids. Like 8-year-old Jimmy, who immediately thinks he’s going to die. Or 15-year-old Greg, who attempted to bully Mike since he was the oldest. My favorite so far, though, has to be Jared. He’s your stereotypical dorky kid and will probably provide the comic relief. For some reason, I am immediately drawn to the kid who hopes he never has to take a poo. I heard the word "poo" and thought, "I like this guy." Maybe I’m the 12-year-old.

For weeks now, though, I’ve been wondering how the fact that these are young kids would hinder my writing style. I mean, if you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you know that there are points when I can really lay a hurting on someone that I think deserves it. I’m objective but admittedly can be ruthless in picking on people on my good days. But how can I be ruthless on a 10-year-old? How can I say something like, "he’s whining like a third-grader," when he actually might be in third grade? But my mind was put at ease when one of the 9-year-olds of the group said that Greg was acting like he was 2. I’m glad to see kids think like me.

These are no average kids either. I mean, we were told they were of all ages, sizes and cultures, but these are intelligent kids, which makes them above average in my book. Clearly, anyone that was spotlighted tonight was of above average intelligence. And these kids were not without help. For the first two days they had to do a lot of fending for themselves, but after that they got a store with candy, a shop with toys and tools, and a saloon with drinks. They also got at least an idea of direction, with the job board thrust upon them. And this is all good, too. We aren’t talking Survivor here, just providing some basics to see if kids can run a town. They can earn rewards for the town based on their competitions and earn money based on the jobs they do. Tonight, because they finished their challenge on time, they got to choose between a TV and outhouses. The council made the first good choice of their reign by choosing the pots. Now Jared can make sure he doesn’t hurt his colon.

The second good choice they made was giving the gold star to Sophia. At each council meeting a $20,000 gold star will be given out to the kid that deserves it the most, and even though Sophia did a lot of complaining, she also did a lot of work. Frankly, I’m shocked that four kids overlooked the fact that she said she wasn’t happy with their work and still gave her the prize. But it was a wise choice. So to me, the council started off pretty well.

But how about these kids giving their first bit of money to Sophia so she could buy that bike. When they are hungry, they’ll learn the value of a buck. And speaking of that, now that the kids know they can get 20 grand every meeting, you can bet there will be more people stepping up, but probably more chaos, too.

And, of course, the interesting twist is that no kids get voted off. So really, all of them could make it the entire way if they wanted. However, little Jimmy said he wanted to go home already, so I’m sure that sooner or later most of this crew will have had enough.

Please let me know what you thought about the show. There’s quite a bit that still needs to sink in with me to get a good grasp on what we can expect in the future, but it’s a show that certainly has promise!

Until next week, friends.


Please check out our Online Video Guide for more on Kid Nation.

Hello everyone! C'mon back late tonight or tomorrow and be sure to read my blog for Kid Nation. It should be a blast talking about the intestinal fortitude of 11-year-olds!