"Half of CBS's top 10 advertisers surveyed by Advertising Age said they are not in the controversial show that depicts kids ages 8 to 15 forming their own society in a western frontier village, although each cited reasons other than the hubbub as the reason." Among the missing sponsors: Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Ford, Pepsi-Cola and Anheuser-Busch. [AdAge]
While we're sure the 22-page waiver (just posted on the Smoking Gun) the parents and guardians of Kid Nation participants had to sign prior to shipping off their children to 40 fun-filled days in a New Mexico ghost town is nothing more than a boilerplate document that could be used to indemnify the proprietors of any summer camp that intended to film its own amateur production of Lord of the Flies against nuisance lawsuits, scanning the litany of potential disasters lawyers could envision befalling the Nation stars still makes for a pretty good time.
A new show in CBS' fall lineup, Kid Nation, which took a bunch of kids and stuck them in the desert in New Mexico to live on their own for 40 days, is currently embroiled in controversy because the network made parents sign a 22-page waiver so their children could participate on the show. Basically, it seems like CBS took advantage of parents who were either willfully ignorant or saw the show as their kids' ticket to fame. Or maybe both! The financial rewards were laughable—$5,000 for participation, with a possible $20,000 bonus—and the penalties were severe: $5 million if parents or kids broke the confidentiality agreement. Ouch. Oh, and also? CBS owns the rights to the children's life stories in perpetuity and throughout the universe.
People hysterical over the alleged child endangerment issues surrounding the production of Kid Nation—CBS's reality TV show/summer camp/Lord of the Flies hybrid where each episode ends with one child being giving a $20,000 gold star and another being devoured by his or her more socially manipulative castmates—persist in stirring up trouble for this Fall's upcoming breakout hit.
With outrage over Isaiah Washington's unexpected casting in Bionic Woman fading, a new, and dare we say much more interesting, controversy is materializing at the TCAs over Kid Nation, CBS's attempt to inject some much-needed Lord of the Flies-style fun into their Fall schedule. Earlier, TV Week reported on how the producers took advantage of subsequently tightened loopholes in New Mexico's child labor laws and classified the production as a "summer camp" (summer camps, after all, are totally fun, and not at all child-exploiting places of employment) to get the show done; today, ABC News asks a psychologist to opine on how the impressionable minds of these campers might be impacted by the stresses of reality TV:
Fox has yet to officially release its Fall schedule, but we feel confident that nothing they're going to reveal tomorrow can possibly change our opinion about what will be our favorite new show come September: Kid Nation, the bold social experiment in which CBS abandons 40 children in a New Mexico ghost town for 40 days, leaving them to form their own civilization without the interference of adults.
By this third morning of the upfronts, you are probably exhausted by the constant barrage of stories about new television shows you probably won't have the time or desire to watch. (NBC really nailed it: Who has time for new? Give us more of what we already like! Fill us up with your quality, Peacock!) Still, CBS will take its turn before their advertisers today, unveiling a schedule aimed at convincing the money people that their network is ready to move beyond just mindless sitcoms and syndication-friendly procedural dramas and take a (well-calculated, not too scary) risk or two: that's right, the Eye is going (mildly) edgy! On the Fall schedule:
