MENSA International, the V.I.I.Q. club who claims amongst its brainy members such luminaries as Steve Martin, Geena Davis, Jodie Foster, Sharon Stone and Jimmy "180" Woods, has issued a list of what they deem to be the Top Ten Smartest TV Shows of all Time. It's a highly subjective topic sure to provoke debate, as much as for who made MENSA chair Jim Werdell's list (CSI, Boston Legal, Mad About You) as for who didn't (The Sopranos, Quantum Leap, Passions). The full list after the jump:

We're not at all surprised that pint-sized Kid Nation genius Jared (or someone he's contracted to front his e-commerce operation) is indulging a precocious entrepreneurial streak; not only is he auctioning off one of the limited edition, hand-crafted Bonanza City necklaces he can be seen making in a late October episode (subversive product placement!), he's also trying to flip the Wii CBS gave him so he can buy some other games. If he wasn't already our Nation favorite, he certainly is now. [eBay, eBay via Paul Scheer]

We still haven't fully recovered from the emotional devastation of watching helplessly as the kids' primetime community failed, but this video, alleging to show scenes of a Nation reunion, does makes us feel a bit better; even though we're well aware that there were no survivors after the network detonated a small atomic bomb in the town square in an effort to erase their God-playing mistakes, we're nonetheless touched that CBS bothered to pre-shoot such a happy epilogue to the tragic series in case things didn't go as planned, allowing us to pretend—however briefly—that the Great Candy Riot of 2007 never happened.

It is with a heavy heart that we note Kid Nation, the bold experiment in utopia-building bravely undertaken by the finest societal engineers the world of network television has ever seen, ended in tragedy, heartache and utter failure. On last night's season finale, host Jonathan Karsh—whom, we feel obligated to point out, we always believed to be a minion of Satan himself sent to tempt the children with community-eroding worldly pleasures—cackled as the town's Job Board, the monument codifying the ever-shifting caste system that kept CBS Bonanza City from descending into total chaos, was consumed in flames, declaring—please brace yourselves—that there would be no more laws.

We were too psyched about the premiere of Project Runway (wrongly it turns out) to really notice this week's episode of CBS' morally weird show Kid Nation. But we've been flooded by emails asking what in the world Sophia said to Guylan that CBS not only had to bleep it but also blur her sweet mouth? A little context is needed.

Last night on the morally vexed television show "Kid Nation," viewers were introduced to members of the upper class: Natasha from Miami and Mingle from Illinois. According to Alex, a nine-year-old from Reno who is never seen without sunglasses, they're like the "Paris and Nicole." Later in the conversation, Alex confesses he doesn't really know what that means. Of course he wouldn't! His favorite movie stars are Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers. You stay gold, tiny unicorn angel!

Having survived last week's bloody putsch that stripped her of a position on the Town Council but left five of her most loyal Yellow District adherents dead, deposed Kid Nation pageantator Taylor struggled to make the difficult adjustment to her lowered status within the CBS Bonanza City community during Wednesday night's new episode.

Perhaps realizing that airing the footage of Kid Nation's controversial field-trip reward we previewed yesterday might again open up the show to the child-endangerment accusations it has largely left behind since its premiere, the network ultimately decided to edit all Michael Jackson-related moments from last night's episode, even though the "unexpected loss of innocence at the bleached hands of a ghoulish former pop-star" clause in the production's exhaustive waiver technically indemnified them from any legal claims stemming from the children's Neverland Ranch sleepover.

In a sneak preview of tonight's installment of Kid Nation just leaked online, we learn that the citizens of CBS Bonanza City will finally abandon the preternatural maturity that has previously allowed them to choose sensible waste-elimination facilities over a television and soul-nurturing Bibles over a productivity-diminishing mini-golf course, opting for a communal reward too irresistible to pass up in favor of a more practical prize.

While we've already paid one visit today to Kid Nation—by way of some exclusive Junior Miss cheesecake glamour shots of Taylor, or "Queen of the Yellow Hankies" as she insists her disciples refer to her— we thought we'd return once again to the outhouse-deficient Shangri-La, this time with clip in tow. In last night's stunning turn of events, the citizens of Bonanza City were again offered a choice as steeped in moral implication as the TVs vs. Poop-Shacks vote of the debut episode.

It was a Tuesday morning and as I sat down to the computer, a mug of kombucha tea steaming at my elbow. I had made a breakfast ragout of autumnal vegetables (squash, pumpkin). The wife had taken our incredibly self-satisfied dog Leslie out for a walk and my four-year-old son Mordecai was in the other room, reading the Wall Street Journal "Puh-pah," he said, "when I'm in ur gardenz, prunin' teh plants, am I a hedge fund manager?" Smart kid!

While we never expected Kid Nation's pioneers to succumb to the siren song of virgin sasparilla this quickly, it was inevitable that residents of CBS Bonanza City would eventually turn to drink to blunt the pain of their workaday lives; after all, there are only so many filthy, overflowing outhouses a ten-year-old can scrub before she needs a little help forgetting she's trapped in the Laborer class for at least another week.

Understandably unhappy professional father Neal Pollack is understandably unhappy that yesterday we called his four-year old son Elijah the worst and predicted that in a few years he'll be a full-grown horror show. Why did we launch this "disgusting sneak attack," he asks, in an email blast to his "Friends, Colleagues, Supporters, and anyone else who might be interested."

On last night's episode of Kid Nation, the pint-sized utopia-builders of CBS Bonanza City learned the sobering lesson that among the dozens of off-camera adults retained by the network so that their bold social experiment didn't quickly devolve into a prepubescent Jonestown (watch out for that Michael kid—the way that he can make the entire Nation applaud his every utterance is disquieting), not a single one was there to slaughter their chickens for them, requiring that at least one grade-schooler was going to get a crash course in the art of poultry butchering.

· Rob Reiner officially endorses Hillary Clinton, immediately embracing her campaign's talking points on Barack Obama: "Based on the experience I have had in politics, and I have been on the front lines in a lot of these fights, I came around to realizing that we do need the most experienced and most qualified person to run the country." [Variety]
· The much-anticipated premiere-night Nielsen deathmatch between NBC's Bionic Woman remake and ABC's Grey's Anatomy spin-off is won by Bionic; meanwhile, Kid Nation dropped off from its unspectacular debut numbers of last week. [THR]
· Mark your calendars, Michael Bay fans, because giant fucking robots are coming again, eventually: Paramount and DreamWorks have staked out June 26th, 2009 for Transformers 2. And the project stays even if Spielberg and his pals go. [Variety]
· Bonnie Hunt is getting a daytime talk show. [THR]
· And on the development battlefront, NBC and ABC set up competing, Famesque projects about young people chasing their performing arts dreams in NY. [Variety]

Despite how easy our earlier video of last night's eagerly anticipated Kid Nation premiere might have made life in CBS Bonanza City, NM seem, the children's new frontier existence is not all fun and choosing-whether-to-be-passively-entertained- or-poop-before-your-bowels-rupture games. Being separated from one's parents or pageant coaches for the first time can be an emotionally devastating experience that not every grade-school-age society-builder is equipped to handle, as you can clearly see above in the teary eyes of Jimmy and Taylor.

You catch the new CBS reality show "Kid Nation" last night? Its detractors have likened it to child labor and suggested that the children in the show might have been exploited and left vulnerable and unprotected in an abandoned New Mexico town. We don't really know all the facts, because we haven't really cared enough to read any of the articles all the way to the end. Also, we didn't watch the show. We did, however, put together a montage of all the sissy babies who cried. Enjoy!

Even though the pre-release controversy surrounding Kid Nation, CBS's attempt to bring Lord of the Flies-style improvisational community-building to primetime television, seemed to indicate each episode would bring viewers harrowing footage of exhausted 10-year-olds mistakenly chugging bleach or sacrificing their weakest, most homesick citizens to a pack of ravenous coyotes for the good of an evolving society, the physical jeopardy in which the Nationeers were placed in last night's premiere exceeded anything we were prepared for.

· What showbiz name evokes Rat Pack-era Hollywood cool more than any other? That's right: Brett Ratner. The singularly hacky Rush Hour 3 director, continuing his ongoing mission to diminish the legacies of legends whose lifestyles he desperately wishes to emulate, will reteam with screechy muse Chris Tucker for an adaptation of Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra, a tell-all bio about Sinatra's relationship with his valet. "I think [Ratner's] channeling Frank sometimes," says one the book's authors, rolling around in a pile of New Line's option cash. [Variety]
· Dan Rather opens a can containing $70 million worth of legal whoop-ass on CBS, claiming that the network scapegoated him for the Memogate scandal. [THR]
· DreamWorks Animation runs screaming from a May 2009 box office confrontation with James Cameron's Avatar, moving their Monsters Vs. Aliens to a safer Easter '09 release date. [Variety]
· Fox picks up Raffik, a police procedural about a Borat-like Albanian detective dispatched to the US Americas to amuse the LAPD with his observations about the differences in their law enforcement techniques. [THR]
· The premiere numbers for Kelsey Grammer's Back to You, Gordon "Scorched Bollocks" Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and the New Mexico Child Welfare Department's Kid Nation are uniformly "solid" but "unspectacular." Also, as expected, plenty of female teenagers watched Gossip Girl. [Variety]

· CBS has quietly set up preview screenings of Kid Nation at elementary schools in major markets for students, parents, and teachers, where families can come together and discuss the exciting child-labor-law issues raised by the controversial new series, as well as receive assurances from the network that no children were eaten by bears during the show's production, even though that unlikely eventuality was covered by that now-infamous waiver. [Variety]
· HBO Films greenlights a feature version of Grey Gardens, the 1975 crazy-cat-lady documentary that has also recently spawned a crazy-cat-lady Broadway musical, and which will star Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. [THR]
· In an onscreen pairing that will result in a dramatic showdown between the dreamiest and the sleepiest sets of blue eyes in all of Young Hollywood, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire are in negotiations to join Brothers, director Jim Sheridan's remake of a Danish-language war drama. Our prediction: after their first shared scene, Maguire locks himself in his trailer, ashamed that his orbs will never sparkle like Gyllenhaal's. [Variety]
· Star Trek's JJ Abrams chooses Zoe Saldana as the new Uhura. [THR]
· Huzzah! The Fall TV season is here! And while we didn't watch the solidly rated premiere of Fox's K-ville last night, it's nice to know that we have finally something to neglect besides shows about remembering karaoke lyrics. [Variety]