KEY POINTS:
For America's stage mothers, the pitch could not have been clearer: send your children - 8 to 15 years old - to an abandoned ghost town in the boiling heat of the New Mexico desert for a reality TV show Survivor meets Lord of the Flies.
The children
were asked to perform on camera for more than 14 hours a day, seven days a week during the school year without any studio teachers or parents on the set.
Such practices are banned across much of America, but in New Mexico a loophole exempted television companies from normal child protection laws.
Even before the first episode of the new CBS series Kid Nation has been aired, howls of outrage are being heard from competing networks and parents groups across the country.
And after a preview of the series for television critics this week, one person present blurted out what was on everyone's mind when she said: "Who the hell would let their kids do that?"
The idea behind the show is for the children to attempt to forge their own society and "fix the mistakes of their forebears" and turn the "completely dead ... former mining town" of Bonanza City into a functioning community.
CBS is quietly delighted with the fuss as it taps into the voyeuristic allure of family dynamics with a twist. Kid Nation is already the most talked about TV series of the coming season.
Working quietly, CBS used a loophole in New Mexico law to declare the production a "summer camp" rather than a place of employment, just before the law was changed. In so doing it is but the latest TV network to use children to provide cheap entertainment for viewers and to boost its bottom line.
Producer Tom Forman and CBS wanted to go further than any television series had previously dared in isolating children from the outside world.
In fact, while the children of Kid Nation do not have their pushy parents on the set, they are surrounded by producers and camera crews. Far from being left "alone" to cook, clean and fend for themselves, they are a pampered lot of would-be Hollywood child stars.
- Independent