Discovery

I’ve watched enough “Entourage” to be familiar with the pattern of declining enjoyment that can sometimes accompany devoutly following a tv show: Legit excitement at first, giving way to satisfactory routine, and ending with the cerebral realization that you’re no longer deriving pleasure from the time you’re wasting watching the thing. To go through this entire progression FOUR EPISODES INTO A DAMN TV SERIES, though, is simply unprecedented to me.

Last night’s “Kid Nation” took the whole “producers clearly scripting this show as blatantly as any other reality show” shadowy truth and threw it in our faces so flagrantly, no amount of Jared quips or screaming kids covered in flour could distract us. The episode opened with an inorganic discourse about everyone’s religious background in which you could practically see the cartoon devil producers sitting on the kids’ shoulders and speaking through them. The absurdity then climaxed when the kids were offered a choice of a miniature golf course or a “library of religious books” and voted for the books, followed with meandering shots of kids reading the Bible and the Koran from page one, cutting away before they inevitably lost interest and couldn’t pronounce any words by page 1.00003.

What kind of fake-ass, eight-year-old marionette-child chooses religious books over a miniature golf course?? When I was eight, I would have chosen the golf course even if it meant bulldozing multiple libraries of religious books to make the space. Hell, I’d still vote that way. Is anyone holding that vote right now? I want in.

One little producer’s-bitch even had the gall to argue, “golf courses are fun and all, but these books can help you grow as a person.” Really? In just a two week span, when you’re also on a reality show and too young to understand anything in them?? Reading Tolstoy can help you grow as a person too, but that doesn’t mean you should want a Tolstoy novel when you are eight years old and in a f**king desert.

There’s only one solution to rescue this show from being overproduced into reality-show oblivion: Kid Nation II must include ONLY KIDS. No host, no producers, no gold stars, no challenges unless the kids come up with them, and a camera crew and editing team consisting entirely of children aged eight to fifteen. You really don’t think Kiddie Macgyver couldn’t edit a tv show (and probably improve it)? If you can’t do that, CBS, at the very least give Jared his own spin-off show.

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and tune in to Episode 5, but the second the kids start arguing about Emmanuel Kant and theoretical relativity, I’m bolting for the remote and On Demanding this week’s “Curb.” That show may be in stage three as well, but at least it’s only half an hour.